Thanks for the invitation to be here.
I'm going to begin with a digression. Earlier in May I received a call to come to Ottawa to speak about Asian carp before the Standing Committee on Fisheries and Oceans, on a date that fell in the middle of a week that my wife and I had booked for holidays. She was very understanding and I came to Ottawa. It went very well. We decided we would take our holidays later in the month, and that would be fine. We were in the middle of them last week when I got a phone call from your clerk telling me that I was hopefully going to be able to come here on Monday evening to testify for Bill C-38's hearings. So somebody here owes my wife flowers.
Nonetheless, my invitation didn't arrive in time for me to put together a brief, and if my remarks have the feel of a stream of consciousness address, I apologize in advance, and I apologize to the translation services also for not having notes. I will be speaking exclusively in English.
I'm the executive director for the Ontario Commercial Fisheries' Association. I represent fisheries in Ontario, on the Great Lakes and its connecting waterways on Lake Nipigon and a number of inland waters in the province. We've been an industry that's been well-established in Ontario in its current European fishery form since the 18th century, and there is abundant evidence in the historical archeological record of a commercial fishery in Ontario for centuries before European contact.
We're nationally small but locally very important, and in some cases very important to the history, the culture, and the economy of the communities where we are engaged in business. I will say at the outset that I think the fishery in Ontario is unique and instructive. We prosecute the fishery alongside an extraordinary mix of other economic activities, large and small. We do it in water bodies that are much smaller in scale than some of the other fisheries that are prosecuted on the coasts and elsewhere in the country, where the impacts of other activities can become magnified by the scale of the habitat in which our fisheries exist.
As such, the full range of bad things that can happen when you get it wrong have happened to us over the years. It's perhaps for that reason that at least as it relates to the Fisheries Act provisions of Bill C-38, there was a great deal of consternation about the uncertainty that was being introduced into the mix by this legislation.
Let me give you a bit of history. Fish and fisheries have not done well in the interaction between our industry and other industries, whether they be other resource extraction industries or manufacturing or any of the other ways that people make money, big and small, in Ontario. That's true especially as it relates to habitat destruction and degradation.
Here's an example. There was an enormously productive spawning reef in the lower reaches of the Detroit River that produced vast quantities of cisco, white fish, and any number of other fish that were an important part of the Lake Erie fishery. That was dynamited for navigational purposes early in the 20th century, which would have been bad enough, except that instead of removing the blasting spoils in trucks, they just spread it over the remaining reefs in the river, which would have been available otherwise to the fish as spawning habitat had they removed it from the water and taken it away. They completely obliterated all possible spawning habitat from the lower reaches of that river.
The reason they did that was not that they were bad people; the reason they did that was that it was convenient. I suspect that for the most part, people in responsible positions in that project understood full well that they were eliminating spawning habitat at the time. They didn't have to, so they didn't. It was cheaper to do it the way they did, so that's how it got done.
We may think that we do things differently now, but I submit to you that when money is tight and budgets are close and circumstances are straitened and the competition is biting at your heels, people don't tend to do inconvenient things unless they have to. If there's a fudge factor that's involved, well, it gets invoked if it can be.
There are more examples. There were spawning reefs all over the Great Lakes that were removed for gravel and cobble to build roads, to build buildings, to do all manner of good things. Many of the buildings of a historical nature in Ontario that we admire were built with materials that were extracted in that manner. They're gone forever. Those habitats cannot be reclaimed except at enormous expense.
The number of wetlands in Ontario that have been demolished in one form or another, whether by filling them in to build on, by digging drainage channels through them to drain them dry for agriculture or other land use purposes, by any number of very ingenious techniques that have been devised—each and every one of those was a fisheries habitat, either directly or indirectly.
The point is that these things don't happen so much anymore. The reason they don't happen so much anymore is the result of a number of pieces of legislation or regulation, but overwhelmingly, the most important piece of regulatory paper that we have to stop that kind of thing from happening, and the reason that it is so rare, is section 35 of the Fisheries Act. That is a lynchpin of fisheries management in this country, and certainly in Ontario.
I have just recently been through an extremely worrisome exercise in Lake Erie again, which has over 80% of the commercial fishery in Ontario, where there were a number of proposals to put hundreds of wind turbines on the western basin of Lake Erie, which is the nursery of the lake. It was being pushed very aggressively by a provincial government that fancies itself to be environmentally sound, and they seem sincere in seeing themselves that way. They believe that renewable energy is an environmentally good thing. The hammer we had was the Fisheries Act, section 35 specifically, and boy, did we wield it.
When I look at the sorts of things that are being proposed now, my first reaction is that it's not very clear. It's not at all clear where this is going to land. I have to tell you, there is an awful lot of accumulated wisdom out there that could help you come up with a system for revising the Fisheries Act, and particularly the habitat regulations, because we think they could stand to be improved as well. There is a lot of wisdom in the industry. There is a lot of wisdom in academia. There is a lot of wisdom within the staff you employ within the public service and in other levels of government.
But it requires a proper process. It requires full stakeholder engagement from all sides. It requires detailed agendas to be drawn up and worked through in a way that does not put us in a position where the law of unintended consequences comes home with a vengeance.
I am somewhat mollified by some of what I have heard about some of what I was worried about in the bill, but when I read the remarks of the minister with regard to what constitutes habitat, what constitutes a fishery, my worries are brought back with force.
I would say that we feel strongly that the Fisheries Act is due for a revisit, but a new Fisheries Act should incorporate strong safeguards for fisheries, potential fisheries, and fisheries rehab through science-based management, and I would echo Mr. Rees's comments about science and programs like the Experimental Lakes Area, which was instrumental in saving the fishery in Lake Erie. We wouldn't have saved it if we hadn't had the Experimental Lakes Area project, and full stakeholder engagement.
Do I have any time left at all?