Thank you.
The chair was trying to recall what I was discussing in the context of Mr. Genuis's subamendment. I was speaking the other night about the issue of why the Minister of Public Safety, who is responsible for our police forces, security forces and the RCMP in particular, needs to appear to discuss the expenditure of the budget for the RCMP.
In my part of the world, large parts of what they do don't seem to be the enforcement of the law in the context of community policing.
I know Mr. Beech enjoyed his time on the fisheries committee, as do I currently.
I was speaking of the crisis we have in Nova Scotia and southern New Brunswick with the elver fishery and the lack of law enforcement. I'm trying to understand where the RCMP money is going, since it's not going to enforcing the law around this.
If the minister were here, then I would bring some of the things to the minister's attention that were brought to my attention this morning, in fact. The Attorney General of New Brunswick called me this morning. He is Ted Flemming. That's a great, historic, political name in New Brunswick. His father was premier of New Brunswick. He is the Attorney General under Premier Higgs.
He called me about the elver fishery crisis in New Brunswick this morning. It is lawlessness in New Brunswick. Poachers are decimating the rivers. The legal licence-holders of those licences have been taken out of the water by the enforcement arm of DFO. Perhaps the fisheries minister should be accountable for the budget allocations in here as well. That might be another subamendment.
In this case, I explained to Mr. Flemming the history of how the elver fishery had developed in the last 30 years. There are eight legal commercial licence-holders, and an additional three first nations licence-holders. Two of them were granted by the current Minister of Fisheries. Those licences represent 250 to 300 harvesters who are on specific rivers. They are licensed to a specific river.
I'll remind those who maybe didn't have the pleasure of listening to my discussion about elvers the other night that an elver is a baby eel. It's sometimes known as a glass eel. Glass eels, as I said the other night, are not as cute as seals, but they're worth a heck of a lot more money. They're worth about $5,000 a kilogram and they're easy to catch.
They're born in a place called the Sargasso Sea, which is where four Atlantic currents come together in the North Atlantic. They migrate back to the rivers where their parents were. In the case of Atlantic Canada in New Brunswick and Nova Scotia, they start coming at the beginning of March, and they go until July returning to the rivers. They go to the headwaters and into the lakes, and they become full-blown adult eels over time. When they're older and it's time to reproduce, those eels leave the rivers and go back to the Sargasso Sea.
Why are glass eels so valuable? It's created this lawlessness issue that's going on in Nova Scotia where the RCMP needs to be held to account—or specifically, the Minister for Public Safety needs to be held to account—for the lack of enforcement and the use of taxpayer money in that budget. It's only existed for about 30 years because there has been technology developed to ship them live to Asia as baby eels. Through land-based aquaculture, they're grown into full-sized eels and then sold throughout Asia, particularly Japan, for seafood. It's much easier to ship a 10-centimetre long little baby eel to Asia than it is to try to catch a full-sized eel. It's a lot more cost effective that way.
As a result of the fact that the most prized eels—glass eels, baby eels—are in the Maritimes and a bit in Maine, the price has gone in 10 years from a few hundred dollars to $5,000 a kilogram.
The licence-holders were reporting to the RCMP as early as March 1 when they arrived that there were poachers on all the rivers. The licence-holders were reporting this to RCMP and to DFO enforcement, but they didn't show up. It was sort of like finding Freeland. We could not find evidence of DFO actually participating and enforcing the law. “Finding fisheries” is a game that's now being played in Nova Scotia and throughout southern New Brunswick on the Bay of Fundy rivers, similar the game we play here in Ottawa called “finding Freeland”.
The finding fisheries issue is that from March 1 until March 28, when the legal season opened, fishery officers in enforcement and visibility on those rivers to prevent the poaching were as infrequent as the finding Freeland issue here in Ottawa. Every day, those licence-holders were complaining—as I'm sure the members of the government do, complaining about finding Freeland—that the fishery officers were not showing up to actually enforce the law. Nonetheless, like most fish harvesters, they were busy getting ready for the season. They gave the government the benefit of the doubt that once when the legal season started, somehow DFO and the RCMP would start doing their job.
Well, they didn't. Only 18 days in, because of the amount of poaching that was going on, the minister closed the season—after only 18 days, when it goes to July. She did that on the basis of an estimate of the total allowable catch. Every fish species except for lobster....
Don't get me going on lobster, because we'll be here for days. I can talk about lobster forever.
The elver fishery has this very limited season. After only 18 days it was closed, because the enforcement officers, DFO and the RCMP, apparently were watching. They were observing. They weren't arresting. They were watching and observing the poachers. What they were doing, apparently, was trying to calculate how much the poachers were getting. When they felt that the poachers had caught the total available catch that DFO had licensed to the licensed fishery harvesters, she shut down the season.
In other words, for those listening, those who legally had the total allowable kilograms to catch, which is about 10,000 kilograms, were not allowed to catch it because poachers were on the river, but the minister was actually trying to verify how much the poachers were catching and using their catch as a reason to shut down the fishery.
This is what has led to the frustration. There is one licence-holder in my riding who every day since then has written to the ministers, including public safety. It started with the local RCMP and the local fisheries folks and has escalated, but every day since the closure he has filed a report. I'd like to read some of those emails to these ministers and to the local fisheries enforcement officers.
The individual who is writing these...because obviously we should identify them. It's easier to identify Stanley King, the licence-holder, than it is when we're trying to find Freeland. He wrote on September 17 to the local enforcement officers: Hello, C and P and the RCMP; I'm writing to report continued elver poaching on the East River.
For those of you who don't know, that's off exit 7 of Highway 103 in Lunenburg County, quite close to Chester. Technically it's East Chester, about 12 minutes from my house.
He wrote that illegal fishing has gone unfettered on the East River both nights since the fishery was closed by DFO.
On Saturday night, I actually visited the East River at midnight. I saw this for myself. He wrote that Saturday night, poachers fished from at least 21:28 nautical time—for those of you who don't follow that, it's 11:28 in the night—until 6:17 in the morning.
How do they know that? All the legal licence-holders have cameras on their rivers, and have for years, to provide evidence in case someone decides to destroy their equipment or actually poaches.
He went on to say that they set three fyke nets.
There are two ways to catch elvers. One is called a dip net and the other is called a fyke net. A fyke net gets anchored in the river and the net channels the elvers into this little hole in the middle, which then captures them in the end, because they're swimming upstream. It uses the great mysteries of the currents of rivers and the tides, because they come in on the in tide.
Elver fishing happens in the night, particularly by poachers. Poachers and people who commit crimes like to do things under the cover of darkness. Elvers come in when the tide is coming in and they come up the river. The poachers go out fishing at night and put lights on their heads, because when they stand there with a light, or flash it on the water....
Does anyone here go fly fishing themselves? You know it's illegal to use a light when you fish at night. In most cases you're not allowed to fish at night, because they are attracted to light.
They use light to attract the elvers as they come up the river, and I'll show you some pictures of this, because they're in these emails. They come up and are attracted, and they get channelled into either this net or this net called a dip net. It's just a thing you do by hand. You just stick it in the water and you put it in a five-gallon, pink pail and then you transport it over to a larger lobster crate, which has a bubbler. Then they transport them to Toronto. Generally they're going through the live cargo facility in Toronto, which DFO or the RCMP doesn't seem to spend any time monitoring.
I'd like to ask the Minister of Public Safety why they do not monitor for illegal activity through the live seafood container facility at Pearson airport, and why they continue to ignore that.
He went on in this first email and said that they set at least three fyke nets. He attached pictures to this email. I didn't bring those with me. This is the next night. He said that on Sunday night poachers fished from 22:40 until 4:46 in the morning. They fished on Saturday from 9:30 at night until 6 a.m., and on Sunday night they fished from 11:40, close to midnight, until 4 a.m. I know this, as I said, because they recorded on their motion-detecting cameras.
East River is very important in Chester, as he says.