Fisheries Committee on Feb. 15th, 2024

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

Okay, so we'd agree to that with the wording changed.

Thank you.

[The Chair, Liberal, Ken McDonald]

All right.

Is everybody okay with the motion as presented?

(Motion agreed to)

[Lisa Marie Barron, NDP, Nanaimo—Ladysmith, BC]

That's great.

Can I move on with my line of questioning?

[The Chair, Liberal, Ken McDonald]

Yes. You still have four and a half minutes.

[Lisa Marie Barron, NDP, Nanaimo—Ladysmith, BC]

All right.

There has been lots of great testimony provided today.

My first question is for Dr. Peacock.

You spoke about the lack of public data available since 2008. Can you tell us a bit more about the lack of data, the implications of the lack of data, and any further information you'd like to provide?

[Dr. Stephanie Peacock]

Sure. It's a great opportunity to elaborate on that. I'd like to point out that as Brandy said, a lot of monitoring is happening, and first nations have taken amazing leadership on monitoring salmon within their territories.

I think one of the issues is that there hasn't been leadership by DFO on centralizing and making data available. Even though there's also DFO-led monitoring on a number of sonar projects, those data are largely made public through the joint technical committee meetings and the Yukon River Panel meetings. They're really buried in hundreds of pages of PDF reports from which you cannot easily extract numbers. They're not provided in an analyzable format.

In the work I do to try to understand salmon populations, to share that information publicly and to create a common baseline understanding of how salmon are doing, it's extremely challenging to dig these data out of reports and copy them line by line. I can't even copy and paste out of the joint technical committee reports, because they are password-protected.

I think accessibility is a major issue here. DFO has historically been charged with compiling and analyzing data and making it accessible. Increasingly we're seeing that data collection happens by first nations. Kudos to them. It does mean that there's a bit of a gap in that larger-picture understanding. That's what I really see as a role that needs to be filled.

[Lisa Marie Barron, NDP, Nanaimo—Ladysmith, BC]

Thank you so much, and hopefully I won't put you in a position, Ms. Mayes, where you're cut off again at the end.

You talked about the importance of indigenous knowledge going hand in hand with science. I'm wondering if you can expand on that a little, because I think it relates to what we were just talking about.

[Brandy Mayes]

I can, absolutely.

When we look at both knowledge systems, they're equally important, but we tend to put indigenous knowledge aside and recognize most of the science.

When you actually look at what's happening on the Yukon River, the people who live along the river are the people who actually know what's happening. They've maintained the salmon populations and had a relationship with salmon for thousands of years, and they've not depleted it. Then we look at how we've been managing this by science, and we're in trouble. It's been by the numbers only and it's been quantitative, and it hasn't been looking at what is happening in the river.

We look at what the Pilot Station site says, and it says that this is the science. It looks at the numbers coming through, and it says we're going to manage to the upper level in terms of how many salmon we can take out of that system, when the indigenous people are saying, no, we actually have to slow down.

Our people have been saying for 20 years that we need to slow down in fishing. We need to recognize that we need to not take all the first run, because those are the first ones that are going to get through it. They're the fast ones. They're the males. Then people say, “Okay—it's the middle of the run, so we're going to take the next ones.” As people on the river, we know those are the bigger salmon. Those are the slower females that are coming through. We know we need to get those females through, and that's why we don't take that big pulse in the second run. We take the first ones because we know there are still more males coming.

This is just traditional knowledge, and that is the actual knowledge from seeing what's happening on the river. That's why it's so important to take that into consideration when we're looking at developing and rebuilding a plan, or even when we're managing within the “in season”, as they call it.

[The Chair, Liberal, Ken McDonald]

You have 20 seconds.

[Lisa Marie Barron, NDP, Nanaimo—Ladysmith, BC]

That's okay. I'm not going to put any of our witnesses in a position of trying to answer something in 15 seconds.

[The Chair, Liberal, Ken McDonald]

Okay. Thank you.

We have five more minutes left in our opening hour. I believe Mr. Bragdon is next, and if he could keep it to under five, that would be great.

[Richard Bragdon, Conservative, Tobique—Mactaquac, NB]

There was no hint in there was there, Mr. Chair?

It's good to be with you. I want to thank each of the witnesses today. Thank you for taking the time. We're honoured to have you join us. Thanks to our colleague Mr. Hanley for pushing to make sure this happened and for his passion around this issue. It's so important and so vital.

I hope someday to have the opportunity to visit the beautiful Yukon territory. I've never been to the Yukon, but hopefully that will happen at some point.

Hearing your stories and hearing about the obvious significance and connection between the salmon and your peoples is powerful indeed.

I'm a practical person. I know I'm not as technical or scientific, but could you just step back and look at it through a layman's lens and cut right through all of the data and the information, which is all very important, and bring it down to what you would rank as the top three biggest challenges? I know there are numerous challenges, but what are the top three biggest challenges to which you feel we could get a solution the fastest or have action and practical steps taken the fastest to get us closer to seeing a rehabilitation of the stocks in your rivers?

I know it's kind of a big, broad, open question, but I think a lot of people listening today want to know what we can do with respect to temperatures and things like that overall. They're big challenges that are going to be with us for a long time. I don't know if there's anything immediate, especially by one nation, that is going to fix or solve that problem, but perhaps there are things within our control locally that we can do.

I'll start with you, Ms. Mayes, and then I'd be interested in hearing from Dr. Peacock and of course from Chief Tom. That's my long preamble, but now it's over to you to answer the big question.

[Brandy Mayes]

Thank you.

We for sure will welcome you to the Yukon if you come and visit us, and we'll show you a good time.

Well, there's not just one thing, but I would like to say that number one for Kwanlin Dün is that we are looking at the agreements under chapter 16, and we need a new fishway. A new fishway is one thing. It's not going to be immediate. It's going to take time, and it's going to take a lot of resources and money. We need one to be done for in-migration and out-migration. We need to look at the impacts from that dam. We need to continue the studies. There is some work being done there. That is number one for Kwanlin Dün.

The stewardship centre is looking at whether we can do a small restoration stewardship or conservation hatchery for which we can look at taking some of the brood stock that's left to make sure we can restore some of these creeks.

I think number three for us would be having some support for the rebuilding strategy and working with the U.S. on ocean bycatch. I think that's a number one thing for us on the other side.

[Richard Bragdon, Conservative, Tobique—Mactaquac, NB]

Well done. Thank you. That was a big question.

With the time I have here, I'll go quickly over to you, Dr. Peacock. Then I definitely want to hear from Chief Tom. Try to keep it as succinct as you can. Give me the top three.

[Dr. Stephanie Peacock]

I don't have much to add over what Brandy said. She did an amazing job.

I think, with the Whitehorse dam, the key is that although that will take time, the opportunity is immediate. As she said, the licence is being renegotiated now for 2025. That's an immediate opportunity. Again, as she said, it's putting pressure on our partners across the border in the U.S. to limit the illegal and incidental mortality of chinook. Those are immediate changes.

Other things are going to be hard and take time, but we also need to start on those sooner rather than later.

[Richard Bragdon, Conservative, Tobique—Mactaquac, NB]

Thank you.

Chief Tom, go ahead.

[Nicole Tom]

Yes, come visit the Yukon. You will enjoy yourself.

I would say that the three would include the agreement we have with Alaska, which needs to be negotiated. I would also say regulating the mine-contaminated water discharge into the tributary spawning areas in the Yukon River. I would say that the third thing would be the dam.

[Richard Bragdon, Conservative, Tobique—Mactaquac, NB]

That's excellent.

Is that my time?

[The Chair, Liberal, Ken McDonald]

You have 30 seconds.

[Richard Bragdon, Conservative, Tobique—Mactaquac, NB]

I'll do the same thing. I'll be very kind. I don't want to cut them off.

You all did great. Thank you.

That's all.

[The Chair, Liberal, Ken McDonald]

That concludes our first hour of testimony with our witnesses.

I want to say thank you to Brandy Mayes, Dr. Peacock and Chief Nicole Tom for attending today in person and by Zoom and for sharing their knowledge with the committee on this very important study.

If there's anything you think of that you would like to include in any of the answers to questions you were asked, please, by all means, send it in to the clerk, and we'll make sure it becomes part of the discussion.

We're going to take a short suspension while we change out.

Everybody is on Zoom for the next hour or so.

We're suspended for a moment.

[The Chair, Liberal, Ken McDonald]

Welcome back, everyone.

Before we proceed, I would like to make a few comments for the benefit of the witnesses who just joined us.

Please wait until I recognize you by name before speaking. For those participating by video conference, click on the microphone icon to activate your mic, and please mute yourself when you are not speaking.

There is interpretation for those on Zoom, which means all the witnesses for this session. You have the choice at the bottom of your screen of floor audio, English or French.

Also, I simply want to remind members to be very careful when handling the earpieces, especially when your microphone or your neighbour's microphone is turned on. An earpiece that's placed too close to a microphone is one of the most common causes of sound feedback, which is extremely harmful to interpreters and causes serious injury.

Welcome, witnesses.

We have today, in our second panel, by Zoom, as an individual, Bathsheba Demuth, dean's associate professor of history and environment and society at Brown University. We also have Mr. Dennis Zimmermann, fish and wildlife consultant, Pacific Salmon Treaty Panel member, Big Fish Little Fish Consultants. From Beaver Village Council, we have Chief Rhonda Pitka, and from the the Council of Yukon First Nations, we have Elizabeth MacDonald.

We will begin with opening statements.

We'll go with Bathsheba Demuth for five minutes or less for an opening statement.

[Dr. Bathsheba Demuth, Dean's Associate Professor of History and Environment and Society, Brown University, As an Individual]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

It's an honour to speak with you today. I'd like to start my brief remarks by framing who I am. I'm an environmental historian currently writing a book about the relationship between people and ecology along the Yukon watershed over the past two centuries, so salmon and the way salmon stocks have been managed clearly have a lot to do with this story.

As part of this work, I've been travelling the river, particularly, up to this point, on the Alaska side, by boat and by dog team, as well as working with archival sources and scientific research.

What is clear from this at a very general but, I think, critical point is that salmon are an integral part of Alaska native and first nations communities' lives as well as those of other subsistence users along the Yukon River and its tributaries. This has been true for as long as there have been people along this river.

Today, fish camps are places of cultural sharing, language learning and social revitalization, so being able to fish is an issue of food security and environmental justice. I know that members of this committee are travelling to Yukon to speak with first nations and people on the ground, so I will focus briefly on three points that have emerged from my interviews and general research around settlement, mineral extraction and the regulatory challenge that climate change poses for the Yukon River treaty.

First, with respect to settlement, I'm going to generalize here substantially, because the Yukon is very long, but a key historical adaptation to living in the Yukon's Arctic and subarctic ecologies has been for societies to move, to be fully or partly nomadic, so that when, say, a caribou migration pattern changed, people could adjust where they lived and hunted to be able to intersect with both caribou and salmon.

Since the acts of colonization by the United States and Canada, particularly through compulsory education, first nations and Alaska native peoples have become far less mobile, because you can't move a village like Old Crow just because the caribou are in a different place, but you can build communities near good salmon fishing. So the colonial expectation of permanence has made salmon a particularly critical resource for indigenous communities, both culturally and economically. I wish to underscore the critical need for salmon in communities along the Yukon that are at the end of the global supply chain so that food is expensive and sometimes simply unreliable. This fact makes salmon a critical food security issue.

Second, I'll discuss the history of mineral extraction and salmon. In some ways, this is a familiar history that starts with the Yukon gold rush near the Klondike River, intersects with salmon and their need for spawning streams, and continues through the Faro mine and other large-scale mineral projects. Residents along the river have emphasized to me over the last several years how concerned they are that this history is not over due to potential land withdrawals by the Bureau of Land Management in the United States on the d-1 lands, which would be familiar to Alaskans, as well as the Manh Choh mine and the proposed Ambler Road, all of which would impact Yukon River tributaries.

Historically the wealth that has been generated from mining projects has not stayed in local communities, while the harms have. All along the river, I've heard concern that this history of environmental injustice is likely to be repeated, in part because the discussion of salmon futures is so often separated from that of mining and economic development writ large.

Third and finally, the Yukon salmon treaty and the Yukon River Panel, as my fellow panellists here all know, are charged with setting annual goals to ensure that enough spawning salmon are able to meet the minimum sustainable escapement numbers by regulating the quantity of fishing that happens in the Yukon River. When the treaty was signed in 2001, I believed that this was a sensible move based on the history of commercial and subsistence fishing for Yukon salmon, both of which occurred primarily in rivers, but of course, Yukon salmon spend most of their lives not in the Yukon but in the Bering Sea, which is an ecosystem that is experiencing such a rapid degree of change that I'm basically out of superlatives, as the climate warms and where there are additional ecological pressures from the pollock fishery, which removes some three billion pounds of biomass from the Bering Sea basin every year.

Every person I have spoken to on the Yukon River Panel is deeply dedicated to having generations of salmon, but in this contemporary environment they do not necessarily have the levers to pull to address either bycatch or the changing climate.

Essentially, the Yukon River Salmon Agreement lays out 20th-century tools for what are becoming very 21st-century problems—climate change and ecosystem change due to intensive harvesting.

I want to leave my remarks here by noting that people do have tens of thousands of years of experience in living well with salmon, and, in fact, this is the normal historical experience for salmon and people, so it is a thing that can be done.

Thank you.

[The Chair, Liberal, Ken McDonald]

Thank you for that.

We'll now go to you, Mr. Zimmermann, for five minutes or less, please, for your opening statement.

[Dennis Zimmermann, Fish and Wildlife Consultant and Pacific Salmon Treaty Panel Member, Big Fish Little Fish Consultants, As an Individual]

Thank you.

Thank you for the opportunity to address this esteemed committee today. My name is Dennis Zimmermann. I reside at Whitehorse, Yukon, on the traditional territories of the Kwanlin Dün First Nation and the Ta’an Kwäch'än Council.

There are various hats I wear related to salmon. I am a member of the land claim-established Yukon Salmon Sub-Committee, and I also sit as a Canadian representative on two international salmon treaty tables: the Yukon River Panel, chapter 8 of the Pacific Salmon Treaty, and the Transboundary Panel, chapter 1 of the Pacific Salmon Treaty. I'm a respective Government of Canada and recreational fishery nominee through those two processes.

First and foremost, I want to acknowledge the significance of this specific inquiry and the unique importance of the Yukon River chinook salmon.

Briefly, Yukon River chinook were historically large, old and prominent, in that returning adults would often travel in river and over 3,000 kilometres to their spawning grounds in Canada. I've often talked to Alaskans who catch both Canadian-origin and U.S.-origin chinook, and they speak of the Canadian “king” salmon as leaving puddles of fat on the ground when they put them up in their smokehouse. This nutritional value is highly prized in communities that have severe food security concerns.

I should also identify that with the lens through which I work with salmon—and I often find I'm in the minority—my work has always been centred around community values, human dimensions and the intricate socioecological systems that surround these cherished species. I also work within the philosophy that if people, first nations, recreational fishers and the general public are not interacting with salmon in some way, they are not likely to care nor wish to support it.

Having worked with various Yukon first nations on a number of community-based salmon plans, I've witnessed first-hand the profound impacts that the decline of salmon populations has had on cultures, peoples and ecosystems throughout the territory. As we know, the life history of Pacific salmon has faced multiple stressors at all life stages, many of which have recently been exacerbated by the effects of climate change.

Very briefly, in delving into the causality of this crisis, one needs to reflect on past fishery practices, where it's evident that the maximum sustainable yield approaches, coupled with uncertainties in run-size projections and a reluctance to manage in-season fisheries, took their toll on chinook salmon populations and essentially beat down their resilience over the years.

Over decades, we've witnessed the loss of older-year classes and of larger, more fecund fish, ultimately resulting in a shift towards fewer, younger and smaller salmon returning. We call this “quality of escapement”, which is not generally accepted within the treaty as a metric to meet escapement goals. In my opinion, there was not enough risk-and-precautionary principle built into the management regimes, whereby treaty escapement goals were considered to be met by achieving a bottom end of ranges and putting just enough Canadian-origin fish into the spawning grounds.

Despite a proliferation of science often thrown at Yukon River chinook—what we often refer to as the counting and measuring approach—the status quo has failed to effectively address the decline in salmon populations. Approximately two decades ago, Yukon first nation voices began sounding the alarm, particularly at the headwaters in Canada, with the Teslin Tlingit Council, where at every meeting elders like Madeleine Jackson would advocate for voluntary subsistence fishery closures in Canada and across the river.

These community voices continue to sound and have moved consistently downriver to the point where we are now, where the impacts are being felt from the headwaters to the ocean. All 50-plus communities that depend in some way on Yukon River chinook in Alaska and Yukon are suffering, no longer fishing, and, most importantly, losing their connection to salmon culture.

Unfortunately, this is another fishery that has shown us that management decisions often lag behind the pace of the resource decline. It is with heavy hearts that we must acknowledge that there may be no fisheries into the foreseeable future. Despite the bleak outlook, we can't lose hope, and we need to continue fighting for Yukon River salmon. Now is the time to ensure that science does not go alone and that we employ all the tools in the tool box.

This means, in my opinion, enhanced investments in community-based stewardship efforts, maximizing the value of the few fish that are returning through ceremony, language, story and knowledge transfer. Through small-scale restoration efforts, this may include a variety of habitat restoration efforts, or indigenous-led conservation hatcheries, as an example.

Also, it means maintaining advocacy and diplomatic efforts within the United States and the international community and continuing to advocate for Canadian-origin chinook returns to spawning grounds, as well as coordinating efforts on the high seas as it relates to bycatch, unregulated international fisheries and production hatcheries in the Bering Sea.

Finally, I'm hopeful that with the continued support of the Department of Fisheries and Oceans, Yukon first nations and other partners, our current efforts towards a holistic Yukon River chinook rebuilding plan will provide the blueprint and momentum to help conserve and rebuild our populations so that future generations may maintain that sacred connection to salmon.

Thank you for your time.