House of Commons photo

Crucial Fact

  • His favourite word was fish.

Last in Parliament May 2004, as Canadian Alliance MP for Delta—South Richmond (B.C.)

Won his last election, in 2000, with 57% of the vote.

Statements in the House

Tomato Industry May 15th, 2001

Mr. Speaker, once again Canadian producers are facing unwarranted protectionist actions. U.S. authorities have ruled there is enough evidence to investigate Canadian greenhouse tomato producers for dumping.

Tomatoes contribute $1 billion a year to the B.C. economy and 80% are exported. They contribute $2 billion a year to the economy of Ontario. New U.S. tariffs could devastate a profitable export industry.

Is the government doing anything to protect our greenhouse industry today, or are the Liberals just waiting for U.S. tariffs to shut down the industry?

Canada National Marine Conservation Areas Act May 14th, 2001

Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to address Bill C-10, the marine conservation areas act. I do so as a supporter of parks and marine conservation. Yet I have serious doubts about the bill, as do many people involved in the marine industry in British Columbia including environmentalists.

In a recent conversation with one environmentalist from British Columbia it was pointed out to me that the best approach to protecting our marine environment was good fisheries management. Marine protected areas create little zoos and make us feel good, but good fisheries management is the best way to go. Marine protected areas are no substitute for good fisheries management.

There have been discussions in other jurisdictions in the world on these marine protected areas. I would like to read a short newspaper article from the February 1999 issue of Fishermen's News published in Seattle, entitled “Marine Reserves: Friend or Foe”. It reads:

The effectiveness of existing MPAs in the US should be assessed. A whole lot of MPAs already exist, particularly in California, but nobody knows whether they are having any impact. A thorough and science based review needs to take place of all existing marine protected areas and the myriad of already existing `no-fishing zones' along the California coast and elsewhere to determine their effectiveness for either: (a) providing baseline research information; (b) protecting critical marine habitats, or, (c) protecting specific marine fish or ecosystems. This review should be undertaken by a panel, including marine scientists, appropriate fishery agency representatives, knowledgeable commercial and sport fishermen, and knowledgeable marine conservation representatives. This review should include a report with recommendations for each existing MPA and no-fishing zone as to their effectiveness, whether there should be any changes in regulations or boundaries, and whether each should be maintained, reduced, expanded or eliminated.

That is a good recommendation, which our government would have done well to follow before it proceeded with the legislation.

What is the object of the bill? Is it marine conservation or merely the creation of marine parks? I am concerned that it is the latter, that it has little to do with conservation and much to do with the creation of marine parks.

I am concerned that the bill is only a further signal that the Department of Fisheries and Oceans has given up on marine conservation and protection. Canada does not need a few marine zoos with the rest of her marine ecosystem laid waste by a failure to manage the marine resource.

Canada has fundamentally sound legislation to protect the marine environment, namely the Fisheries Act. The government has failed to enforce either the letter or spirit of this environmentally powerful act. It is considered one of the best pieces of environmental legislation in the world. Section 35 of the Fisheries Act prohibits any activity that results in the harmful alteration, disruption or destruction of fish habitat. In section 36 it specifically prohibits the deposit of a deleterious substance of any kind in water frequented by fish or in any place under any conditions where the deleterious substance or any other deleterious substance that results from the deposit of the deleterious substance may enter any water frequented by fish.

At this very moment the minister of fisheries is working to dumb down these sections of the Fisheries Act that were designed to protect the marine environment. The minister of fisheries wants to make the marine fisheries act aquaculture friendly, forgetting that it was designed to protect fish rather than to promote an industrial activity that if not carefully regulated could destroy the fishery.

Last week in Halifax the minister's Commissioner for Aquaculture Development, Yves Bastien, said that the Fisheries Act and its regulations “were not drafted with aquaculture in mind and this causes significant problems both for the industry and the regulators”.

The Fisheries Act is not now nor was it ever intended to be an aquaculture promotion act. It causes problems for aquaculture because the government refuses to implement siting regulations that would prohibit locating farms in areas that would threaten productive lobster and other shellfish beds, prohibit locating farms near the mouths of fish bearing streams or in the migration route of migratory species such as salmon or would prohibit the use of lights at night that attract and disrupt migratory species. Without clear ground rules that are consistent with the Fisheries Act, the aquaculture industry will not be sustainable either in British Columbia or in the maritime provinces.

The government has called aquaculture the industry of the future. Until the fin fish aquaculture industry has clear and effective rules prohibiting the deposit of deleterious substances in waters frequented by fish and can abide by them, it is merely another polluting and environmentally destructive industry, an industry without a past or a future.

Canadians want seafood that is safe to eat and clean drinkable water. The two go hand in hand. Seafood grown without chemicals are a food of the future and part of any industry of the future. The commercial fishery is an industry of the future with a past that reaches back to the earliest days of exploration and settlement.

Aquaculture will also be an industry of the future when the government puts in place regulations consistent with the spirit and intent of the Fisheries Act. We have not arrived there yet.

Only a few months ago the auditor general tabled in parliament a report entitled “The Effects of Salmon Farming in British Columbia on the Management of Wild Salmon Stocks”. The auditor general advised parliament that the Minister of Fisheries and Oceans and his department were not meeting their legislative obligations under the Fisheries Act to protect wild Pacific salmon and habitat from the effects of salmon farming.

The Department of Fisheries and Oceans, the auditor general found, was not ensuring that salmon farms were monitored for the effects on fish and fish habitat with a view to enforcing the Fisheries Act. “The department”, he said, “is not currently monitoring effects on marine habitat or on juvenile or adult Pacific salmon in the vicinity of net cages”. According to the auditor general, fisheries and oceans scientists drafted siting criteria in 1985 but never enacted them.

Much of Canada's water is neither fit for the survival of fish nor for human consumption. The Minister of Fisheries and Oceans has failed to enforce the Fisheries Act prohibition against dumping. Too often municipalities, industry and forest cutting operations have been allowed to undertake activities that have led to the destruction of the marine environment.

The Fisheries Act is not designed to protect our drinking water but if enforced it makes the job of providing safe drinking water to Canadians much easier. If the Government of Canada were serious about protecting the marine environment, its first priority would be conservation and protection of our marine resources.

Setting aside a few marine parks may be well intentioned but it is not in itself a serious conservation measure. We already have under the Oceans Act the authority to establish marine protected areas. When such marine protected areas are established the first question that must be identified is: What are we trying to protect? Then, what measures must be undertaken to protect it?

Under this marine conservation areas act, large areas along our coastline would be set aside, not because there was a species in need of protection, if there were the fisheries act or marine protected area under their oceans act could be used. No, the marine conservation areas act is about setting aside large so-called representative areas.

I am concerned that these areas will become like land based national parks, no go areas for fishermen, men and women whose livelihood depends on the conservation and protection of the marine resource. Without fishermen on the water in these no fish zones there is likely to be rampant poaching, hardly an effective conservation measure.

Abalone fishing has been prohibited for the past decade, but the species has not returned because poaching has continued on unabated. One of the most effective measures for knowing the state of fishing stocks is to have fishermen fishing.

While the parks minister might deny that these marine conservations areas will become no take zones for fishermen, Bill C-10 appears designed to do just that. For example, in section 4 we are told that marine conservation areas are established for the purpose of protecting and conserving representative marine areas for the benefit, education and enjoyment of the people of Canada and the world. No mention is made of fishermen. If the areas really were intended to be multi-use areas we would see specific mention of fishermen in such a section.

The parks minister is required in section 10 to consult with the provinces, affected coastal communities and aboriginal organizations established under a land claims agreement. No reference is made to those whose livelihood depends on the resource. Fishermen are not at the table.

If it were intended that fishing was to continue, fishermen would be listed in section 10. The same is true for section 11 and so on. Section 11 requires for each marine conservation area that the parks minister establish a management advisory committee to advise the minister on the formulation, review and implementation of the management plan for the area.

Fishermen have been excluded from the act and I am concerned it will not be long before they are excluded from marine conservation areas. If I were convinced the bill would consider fishing and fishermen a legitimate activity and recognized fishermen's constitutional and common law right to fish, the bill would have my enthusiastic support.

I would support any action that would lead to rigorous conservation and protection of the marine resource and recognize the objectives of good fisheries management.

According to a recent series of articles on the advantage of marine protected areas in the Vancouver Sun by Larry Pynn, it would appear that is the case with the large marine protected areas around Australia's Great Barrier Reef. We are told that fishermen there are an integral part of the management regime with 95% of the area open to fishing.

That is not the case with our proposed marine parks act. We must have legislation that will require marine protected areas or conservation areas to develop reasons and scientifically defensible criteria for any and all areas of no-take zones in the marine environment which are over and above the regular management measures taken by DFO under the fisheries act.

Under Bill C-10 fishermen would have no place at the table. There is no recognition of their dependence on the resource. In addition if they are shut out of a marine conservation area there is no recognition of their financial loss and no recognition that they must be compensated.

When Parks Canada creates a land based park, there is no question that any private owners or crown tenure holders on the land are compensated, either a fee simple purchase of the land or buying out of the value associated with tenures such as timber or traffic. Just because marine resources are considered by some to be a common property resource, as are trees on crown land, does not mean that fishermen who have licenses to harvest marine areas do not experience an economic loss and are not entitled to compensation for that loss.

Fishermen must be compensated for any exclusion from licensed harvesting areas resulting from the creation of no take zones in marine conservation areas.

We are told Australian fishermen were compensated for the small area they lost in the Great Barrier Reef marine protection or conservation area.

A requirement for compensating losses is absent from Bill C-10. This would be unthinkable in a land-based park. Why is it not being considered in the marine environment?

Parks Canada has identified areas for the establishment of large marine conservation areas in the Queen Charlottes and the central and south coasts of British Columbia, all areas of significant fishing.

Let me identify several failures of marine conservation management. Let us consider if this bill would deal with these problems. If it did it would have my support.

A fisheries management failure is often camouflaged as a result of climate change, when in fact it is merely a management failure. I am thinking of the near collapse of Fraser River sockeye stocks.

Government ministers and DFO, in particular, blamed the collapse of sockeye on climate change that has caused, they said, changes in the water temperature and the like in the north Pacific. An internal DFO document reports documented evidence that there had been a management failure on the Fraser camouflaged as an environmental failure. Let me refer to the DFO report which, as I said, supports my contention.

The report entitled “Unsanctioned, Partially Monitored First Nations Fisheries on the Fraser River: A Conservation Risk”. The report warned the department that its failure to account for illegal or “unsanctioned fishing represents an egregious affront to salmon conservation”.

The report examined DFO's failure to account for the significant numbers of sockeye that were illegally caught on the Fraser River between Mission and Sawmill Creek. It said that the department had failed in the year 2000 to account for the illegally caught fish due to political and budget reasons.

The report documented how over the past several years that unsanctioned and unquantified in river catch had essentially added to the en route mortality account, the estimated number of fish that died en route to the spawning grounds from natural stress and temporary contact with fishing gear.

It came to the startling conclusion that this consistent failure to account for illegally caught fish together with the misleading practice of lumping them in with en-route mortalities:

—may be wrongly inflating the perceived significance of environmental effects on rates of migration mortality (an area receiving considerable attention since the 1994 Fraser River Public Review Board report).

The report said:

Overall, it is crucial to have a complete picture of catch to determine whether realised catch levels (by all user groups) are consistent with the achievement of desired spawning escapement goals—the fundamental measure of conservation success.

It also said that the estimate of total unsanctioned catch between Mission and Sawmill Creek on the Fraser for the weeks ending June 11th through September 10th was 30,952 sockeye.

The report said that Indian bands fishing in the Cheam and Yale First Nation areas caught 23,415 of these fish, 76% of the unsanctioned catch.

It further said:

Underestimating catch contributes to an underestimate of stock abundance, underestimating rates of exploitation, and difficulty validating and improving in-season abundance estimation that are crucial for implementing fishing plans and successfully achieving spawning escapement goals.

The report observed that conservation and protection that Officers adopted a more passive policy towards unsanctioned sockeye fishing in 2000, seizing fewer nets than previous years, especially 1999, despite valid conservation concerns for co-migrating species such as coho. It said that this was true especially true in the area fished around the Cheam First Nation band.

British Columbians are often presented with a particularly confusing picture of salmon stocks, the state of salmon habitat, and the health of fish populations generally, according to the report. Reasonable and simple questions about the state of the fish and fish habitat in British Columbia are often met with contradictory and confusing answers. Unsanctioned fishing activity is unsanctioned expressly because the fishery is closed to ensure long run conservation of various migrating fish stocks.

Canadians have a right to know about any substantial illegal fishing activity by any user group. Unsanctioned fishing is an area that receives little public attention despite the potentially serious consequences to the status of some stocks.

I could go on and talk not only on the issue in British Columbia but also on the problem of maintaining adequate lobster stocks on the east coast, especially in the area of Burnt Church.

I will quote a short statement from December 13, 2000 question period briefing note to the Prime Minister. It said:

The Burnt Church and Indian Brook bands have refused to acknowledge the government's right to regulate the fishery...They have, instead, asserted treaty rights claims and, in Burnt Church, put in place a large scale illegal lobster fishery.

The government knew about the problems and yet it blamed them on the environment. It is now putting in place marine protected areas as an excuse for failing to enforce existing fisheries regulations. The minister has the power to protect all the fish habitat and all fish in coastal waters but he is not doing his job. The bill will not help him.

Canada National Marine Conservation Areas Act May 14th, 2001

Mr. Speaker, I want to compliment my colleague from Vancouver Island North for his presentation.

I am amazed and dismayed at his comments that the fishing community and community representatives from British Columbia were not well treated by the heritage committee. The member is quite aware that we had requested joint hearings between the fisheries and heritage committees. However the government refused that request. I am upset by that and I am sure my colleague is as well.

Would the member like to comment on that issue, as well as on the issue of the supremacy the fisheries minister would now have and how the bill would water down his authority?

Fisheries May 9th, 2001

Mr. Speaker, again I think the minister's inexperience is showing here. In fisheries management experience is everything. The DFO witnesses, the expert witnesses, admitted they lacked a long time attachment to Fraser River fisheries management.

We have now learned that the minister has removed Fraser panel chair Wayne Saito, a man with a long experience of the Fraser River, from his position and is replacing him with a refugee from the coast guard. Why is the minister rejecting experienced managers at this critical time?

Fisheries May 9th, 2001

Mr. Speaker, last week in fisheries committee DFO officials echoed Pacific Salmon Commission authorities who warned of sweeping closures of summer run sockeye in the Fraser River this summer to protect Adams River stock.

These warnings were in direct conflict with testimony from a recently retired senior official of the Pacific Salmon Commission who warned that failure to harvest surplus sockeye stocks would result in overcrowded spawning grounds and dramatically lowered returns of these runs in four years' time. Given this conflicting advice, what is the minister's intention?

Petitions May 2nd, 2001

Mr. Speaker, the third petition is one which was organized by a constituent of mine, Mr. Grant Campbell. This time I am presenting almost 400 signatures.

The signators are calling upon parliament to enact immediate changes to the criminal code to implement the necessary measures for the protection of Canada's children from exploitive marketing of violence on the Internet and interactive games.

Petitions May 2nd, 2001

Mr. Speaker, the second petition that I have is one with over 1,000 signatures. These residents are concerned about the disbanding of the coast guard dive team by the minister and the resulting death of Paul Sandhu last February 18.

They maintain that more lives could be lost if the dive team is not reinstated. They strongly request and urge the minister to reinstate that dive team.

Petitions May 2nd, 2001

Mr. Speaker, the first petition I have to present today is from rural mail couriers. Their complaint, which is a legitimate one, is that they lack collective bargaining rights where other workers, people who are doing a similar job, have those rights.

They wish that parliament would repeal or amend subsection 13(5) of the Canada Post Corporation Act which prohibits them from having collective bargaining rights.

Highways May 2nd, 2001

Mr. Speaker, with summer approaching Canadians are on the move again. This year they will notice not only the horrendous price of gas compared to the same time last year but the condition of their highways.

The highway infrastructure in the country is falling apart. The present government has a pitiful record on the upkeep of Canada's roads. Last year in British Columbia the government collected some $750 million in gasoline excise taxes yet spent only $400,000.

Recently $60 million was announced for highway improvements in British Columbia, a pittance that ignores the real problems we are facing.

For example, in my neighbourhood a residential street serves as a major highway connecting the Fraser Surrey docks and other major transportation hubs and routes, yet there is no federal money to alleviate the problem. Over 2,000 trucks a day pass through a residential neighbourhood, trucks carrying Lord knows what, yet the Liberal government continues to collect our money and ignore the problem.

Children's Miracle Network April 4th, 2001

Mr. Speaker, April 4 marks the day to recognize the 2001 Champions Across Canada event, which is a celebration of those children who have overcome serious health problems.

Today I would like to welcome Damien and Natasha Kaweski, representing the British Columbia Hospital Foundation. Damien and Natasha are among 12 champions from across Canada representing their hospitals and children who have received hospital care. They are sponsored by foresters of the IOF, who will contribute over $5.5 million this year to support children's hospitals in North America.

From Ottawa the Canadian champions will leave for Walt Disney World in Florida to join 50 other champions from the United States for the children's miracle celebration.

I ask that the House welcome these champions who have overcome so much.