Madam Speaker, it is an honour to rise today to speak to Bill C-251 put forward by my friend and colleague, the hon. member for Coast of Bays—Central—Notre Dame.
The hon. member continues important work undertaken by his predecessor, Mr. Scott Simms, who served in the House from 2004 to 2021. In addition to being chair of the Standing Committee on Fisheries and Oceans, Mr. Simms was also instrumental in the passage of Bill S-208, in 2017, to establish a national seal products day.
It has been and continues to be an honour to work with the members for Coast of Bays—Central—Notre Dame, and I am grateful for their unyielding commitment to conservation and sound fisheries management for indigenous and coastal communities in Newfoundland and Labrador and beyond.
Bill C-251 proposes to establish a requirement for the Minister of Fisheries and Oceans to develop a federal framework on the conservation of fish stocks and management of pinnipeds.
At the outset, I note that this bill's proposed requirement, I believe, is necessitated by the refusal of successive Liberal fisheries ministers to make management decisions needed to conserve and restore Canada's fisheries. In particular, I am talking about fisheries being decimated by populations of pinnipeds, like seals and sea lions, that government inaction has allowed to grow unmanaged.
What is the problem that this bill is seeking to remedy? Well, pinniped populations on Canada's coasts have been allowed to expand unchecked through decades of anti-use and anti-harvest ideologies. As pinniped populations have increased, their impacts, especially predation, have caused a domino effect of imbalances throughout ecosystems and food webs. What my colleague is seeking with this legislation is what I believe all parties want: timely and effective fisheries management to restore balance and to conserve and rebuild Canada's fish stocks.
In the face of sound science, this government has refused to accept or produce a plan to manage pinniped populations that are exacting a great toll on fish stocks, including some that are in critical states. It is as if successive fisheries ministers of this government have chosen to ignore the reality that has been described and defined by scientists, experts, indigenous and non-indigenous fishers and Canadians across our country.
For instance, three years ago, in 2019, the Standing Committee on Fisheries and Oceans, known as FOPO, received testimony from Mr. Robert Bison, a fisheries biologist with the Government of British Columbia. Mr. Bison spoke to the plight of steelhead in B.C. and stated that the “evidence to date suggests that the most likely causes responsible for the decline and survival of abundance include an increase in predation in the inshore marine habitats; increased predation from marine mammals, particularly pinnipeds”.
Mr. Bison went on to testify that all factors of steelhead declines are partially or wholly human-induced effect and that the increase in pinniped populations particularly is largely attributed to marine mammal protection in both Canada and the U.S. He also testified that, in terms of the evidence of causal factors, pinniped predation in the inshore waters actually ranked among the strongest causal factor, not only for steelhead, but for many salmon populations as well.
At the fisheries committee's meeting on June 5, 2019, Dr. Eric Taylor of the University of British Columbia also appeared. In his testimony, Dr. Taylor stated that he supported bold action required to deal with the pinniped issue. He said, “That there may be some uncertainty as to the exact effect of pinnipeds is exactly why bold action is needed.” He want to say, “Instead of residing in this sort of atmosphere of speculation, we can actually provide some management actions to reduce numbers in an experimental approach to try to understand the situation better.”
Here we have two experienced fisheries experts describing to parliamentarians how increased pinniped populations are directly damaging fish populations, including some that are in critical or worse conditions.
At the same meeting in which Mr. Bison and Dr. Taylor provided their testimony, DFO’s director for the Pacific region, Ms. Rebecca Reid, also appeared as a witness and provided testimony that clearly reflected the government’s refusal to manage known and detrimental ecosystem factors, such as pinniped predation in order to support conservation and recoveries of wild fish and marine species.
In her testimony, Ms. Reid told the committee:
In our view, the question about pinnipeds is outstanding. We have done some work. There has been a recent symposium. There is some additional work going on. I would say that the impact of pinnipeds on these species is not entirely clear.
That was three years ago, and the government and its officials continue to stonewall pinniped management actions to save fish populations like Fraser River steelhead and Pacific salmon from being wiped out by out-of-control populations of pinnipeds.
In 2020, Dr. Carl Walters from the University of British Columbia’s Institute for the Oceans and Fisheries appeared at the fisheries committee. Dr. Walters has been doing research on Pacific salmon populations for over 50 years, focused particularly on understanding why there have been severe declines in salmon and herring populations.
Dr. Walters testified how he has come to believe that the declines have been substantially due to massive increases in seal and sea lion populations and their predation impacts as the number of pinnipeds on the Pacific coast today is probably double what it was for the last several thousand years, when first nations people harvested them intensively.
Dr. Walters described how major increases in Steller sea lion populations in B.C. waters outside the Georgia Strait have contributed to Fraser sockeye declines and collapses of two of B.C.’s major herring stocks on the west coast of Vancouver Island and Haida Gwaii. Scientists like Dr. Walters are not only raising the alarm over pinniped populations but they are also proposing viable solutions.
Dr. Walters contributed to one such proposal that he helped the Pacific Balance Pinniped Society develop for commercial and first nations harvesting of seals and sea lions, which is aimed at reducing these pinniped populations and sustaining them at the levels that existed when first nations harvesting maintained balances at ecosystems levels.
As Mr. Bison testified, increases in pinniped populations particularly are largely human induced and attributed to marine mammal protection in both Canada and the U.S. I assume the human decision-makers of the day had good intentions when they introduced protections for marine mammals, but as the decision-makers of today, what are our intentions?
Should we be following science data? Should we take action as pinnipeds in B.C. waters drive our steelhead and salmon populations to extinction? Should we expect the government direction to drive recovery of cod and mackerel stocks in Canada’s Atlantic waters? Should indigenous communities have the right to participate in restoring ecosystem balance through predator management?
From my Conservative colleagues and me, the answers to these four questions are yes, yes, yes and yes. As we see many of Canada's fish stocks continue to decline under the current management regime of preservation based on ideologies instead of conservation based on science, I hope members from all parties will agree that action, not just more studies and talk, needs to happen in our waters to rebuild fish stocks.
I hope hon. colleagues from all parties will support this bill and vote yes, because it is necessary. Timely and effective pinniped management is necessary to restore balance in ecosystems to give our fisheries, the fishers and the communities that depend on them a chance to survive.
