Finance Committee on May 2nd, 2023

[Rick Perkins, Conservative, South Shore—St. Margarets, NS]

No, there are no zeros missing. It's $7. The maximum fine for trespassing on private property in Nova Scotia is $500. When you're fishing a fish and pull 12 to 13 kilograms out a night, at $5,000 a kilogram, $7 is just the cost of doing business. It's not much of a deterrent. It's a tip. It's not a very good tip, but $7 on $5,000 a kilogram is nonetheless a tip.

The community of Hubbards—where this assault happened and where the RCMP arrested the person—again saw more poachers this past weekend. The homeowner where they were trespassing phoned the RCMP and complained. They said, “Will you please come down here and get these illegal trespassers who are poaching fish illegally off my property?” Do you know what the RCMP call centre, which is understaffed by 30% in Nova Scotia, said? They said, “If you keep calling here, we'll arrest you.”

The RCMP and the call centre are getting so many calls about the illegal elver fishery that they're actually threatening law-abiding citizens with arrest for calling and reporting crimes. Is that ironic? Only under the administration of this Minister of Public Safety, who needs to be questioned in this committee, could the RCMP have the freedom to threaten to arrest people for reporting crimes and not do the job of arresting the people who are actually out on the rivers.

The other aspect of this—which the RCMP and the minister need to be held accountable for, in the expenditure of these budget dollars—is the fact that many of these poachers are coming from the United States, the fine city of Toronto, Quebec and New Brunswick. How do we know that? They are bold. They drive around in their trucks with their licence plates and they're parked right by the rivers. You can see them.

Do you know what else they have when they're in their trucks, on the rivers, illegally? This was reported by the legal licence-holders, but it's also one of the reasons why the Department of Fisheries and Oceans told their enforcement officers not to enforce the law on the rivers: They're carrying firearms. They're carrying long guns.

Four weeks ago in West Nova, my colleague Mr. d'Entremont's riding, in a dispute on a river between two poachers on a favourite spot, one of them shot the other. This is what's going on. Our job as a police force is not to stop violence; our job is just to observe. At least, that's what C and P at DFO has been told.

In the last week of the legal elver fishery, the legal elver fishermen have GPS locators on their nets. For the police forces, it's like finding Freeland: Do you whack a mole here? Do you whack a mole there? We have thousands and thousands of poachers on the river. While the poachers are present, maybe it's easier to find a poacher than it is to find Freeland, but the issue going forward for the RCMP has been how they deal with this. Well, an elver fisher had his legal nets stolen, and he had GPS locators in the net. This legal licence-holder phoned me up and said that he did something he probably shouldn't have done. He looked on his phone, and he tracked the net. He tracked it to a house not far away in Shelburne County, the southern part of my riding where they catch the best lobsters in the world. He drove up to the house in his pickup truck. He parked. He took the law into his own hands because the RCMP are not present, and here's another question to ask the Minister of Public Safety: Why are the RCMP not arresting people for transporting firearms, long guns, probably not legal—but, apparently, legal firearm owners are the government's target, not illegal firearm owners—not for the purpose of going to a shooting range to practise and not for the purpose of hunting but to defend their illegal poaching on the rivers? The RCMP are not stopping them from doing this. The Minister of Public Safety needs to be accountable for the fact as to why the RCMP are not arresting people who are poaching and committing crimes, actually transporting illegal firearms throughout Nova Scotia in order to protect their poaching efforts on the rivers.

If that's not bad enough, this fellow actually went to the house where his nets were, and he saw them. They were in the back of a pickup truck. He parked his pickup truck right behind that one and rolled down his window. The guy came out and said, “What are you doing here?” and he said, “I'd like my nets back.” The fellow who had stolen the nets said, “They're not your nets.” The fisher said, “I kinda think they are because spray-painted on them is my DFO licence number. So, they're not your nets; they're mine. I can show you my licence if you want.” Well, the fellow went into his garage, got a shovel, came out and started beating on the guy's truck. When he was done beating on the truck, he dropped the shovel, and he got in his pickup truck and backed it up and slammed it into the front of my constituent's, the legal elver fisherman's, truck and pushed it out onto the road and drove away. So, like the law-abiding citizen that he is, who obeys even DFO fishing laws, the fisher phoned the RCMP.

The minister needs to hear this, and we've not had a chance to ask him in the House. However, I'd love to ask him before the finance committee why it is that when a citizen reports to the RCMP that he has just had his vehicle smashed by a poacher and that he has the tracking, the RCMP does nothing. Not only did he report that—and, of course, there was the insurance company because of the damage that was done—to the RCMP but he also actually reported it three more times to the RCMP. Do you know what he did three more times? The net was in three more poachers' houses. These guys aren't the brightest people in the world, clearly. So, he reported to the RCMP the location of three more poachers' houses that had the net they illegally stole from him, the legal licence-holder. That was a month ago. The RCMP have never called him back. The RCMP have never gone to the houses of any of these individuals. The RCMP have not made a single arrest.

Crimes are being committed all over Nova Scotia around this, and the RCMP and the C and P branch are not implementing their responsibility, as law enforcement officers, on these complaints. In fact, as I told you, they're threatening to arrest law-abiding citizens who report crimes; it is bizarre to me that they would do that.

The RCMP didn't have an excuse during the public service strike for not going out and doing these arrests, like many of the C and P officers had. Even though C and P is an essential service, half of them were still working and the other half of their enforcement arm was not.

As for the elver fishers in the community, people were sick and tired of people defecating on their lawns, sitting on their lawns all night, having to clean up their trash in the morning and having the threat of having people with firearms outside of their houses while they illegally destroyed a fishery. The RCMP did nothing. C and P also did nothing.

When they would call the DFO enforcement offices, the DFO enforcement officers would say that they're sorry, but they're not leaving the office—the few who were essential services. They said they were only there in case there was a shellfish poisoning and they had to cut that fishery down.

Otherwise, if there's illegal lobster fishing, if there's illegal elver fishing and if people are stealing our natural resources.... DFO and its rules exist so that for generations to come—as we've had for generations in the past—we have a sustainable fishery. Fishery is our most renewable resource next to forestry. Fish grow faster than trees. The reason we still have a fishery is that, for the most part, we've managed it well. Although, the seal population—the pinnipeds, the sea lions....

We have pinnipeds. Does everyone know what a pinniped is? A pinniped is a seal or sea lion. There are six types of seals in Atlantic Canada. There are seals in British Columbia. There are seals in the north. It's been a way for indigenous folks to earn a living and feed their families for millennia. There are sea lions out on the western coast in B.C.

Harp seals, grey seals and bearded seals of Atlantic Canada have grown a massive population. It's the only totally healthy population. In fact, yesterday in the fisheries committee, the DFO scientist in charge at DFO was quite proud of the fact that—I assume she gets bonuses—we have a robust seal population. She said that her goal is not to reduce the seal population.

The seal population in Atlantic Canada eats the entire weight of the commercial fishery in Atlantic Canada every 15 days. Ninety-seven per cent of the unnatural mortality of fish on the Atlantic coast comes from seals, with 3% from commercial fishing.

Yet, this government thought it was a revelation last year for the Minister of Fisheries to stand in Newfoundland and declare that seals eat fish. Apparently that was news to her. Maybe she couldn't see them very much from her riding in Vancouver Quadra. I'm not sure what they were eating. It may have been Alberta beef. Who wouldn't want to eat Alberta beef? It's a food source not readily available in the wild in the ocean. They primarily eat capelin, cod and anything they can get.

In 1991—31 years ago—we had to shut down the cod fishery because of its decline. The same thing happened in Norway and Russia at the same time. Our seal population in Atlantic Canada was 2.7 million. That may seem like a lot, but compared to today, it's sort of like trying to find Freeland. Today, we have eight million harp seals and 600,000 grey seals in Nova Scotia—so much so that they've never had them before in Newfoundland, but now they're invasive species. It's the only predator—the only species in the ocean—that we do not commercially hunt.

There are a hundred first nations in British Columbia asking for a start of the seal harvest again. There are first nations in Nova Scotia.

You can now harvest 100% of a seal. Seals are rich in omega-3. Obviously everybody's familiar with their fur and their leather. Some of the Liberal members from Newfoundland quite often have seal fur gear on, as well as some of the Conservatives.

Our member from Notre Dame in Newfoundland, has seal ties, a variety of them. I have one. I've seen one of the ministers in charge of Newfoundland frequently wearing seal fur products in the House of Commons, which I think is totally appropriate, because generally those seals are caught by first nations.

There are a lot of food sources in seals. When you rise to over 12 million of them in the ocean, you have an issue: We're not enforcing part of our responsibility to maintain the biodiversity of the ocean.

This goes back to the issue of the Minister of Public Safety, because the minister's approach, this one's and the previous one's.... I forget what the previous one's job is now. I know where he sits in the House. He's the former police chief in Toronto—

[An hon. member]

It's emergency preparedness.

[Rick Perkins, Conservative, South Shore—St. Margarets, NS]

That's right. He's the Minister of Emergency Preparedness.

[Terry Beech, Liberal, Burnaby North—Seymour, BC]

I have a point of order, Mr. Chair.

[The Chair, Liberal, Peter Fonseca]

We have a point of order from MP Beech.

[Terry Beech, Liberal, Burnaby North—Seymour, BC]

Mr. Chair, this has been—

[Rick Perkins, Conservative, South Shore—St. Margarets, NS]

Fascinating...?

[Terry Beech, Liberal, Burnaby North—Seymour, BC]

—wonderful.

I miss the fisheries and oceans committee. I was on FOPO for three years. I used to be the parliamentary secretary. It has been very educational.

You may have even convinced me. We won't know until we get to a vote.

[Rick Perkins, Conservative, South Shore—St. Margarets, NS]

I thought we had a vote.

[Terry Beech, Liberal, Burnaby North—Seymour, BC]

Out of mercy and goodwill, I'd be happy to suspend.

[The Chair, Liberal, Peter Fonseca]

I think we will suspend at this time.

We'll suspend to our next meeting. Thank you.

[The meeting was suspended at 18:47 p.m., Tuesday, May 2]

[The meeting resumed at 11:03 a.m., Thursday, May 4]

[The Chair, Liberal, Peter Fonseca]

We're resuming meeting number 87 of the House of Commons Standing Committee on Finance and the debate on the motion of PS Beech on the amendment of MP Blaikie and the subamendment of MP Genuis in relation to the study of Bill C-47.

Today's meeting is taking place in the hybrid format, pursuant to the House order of June 23, 2022. Members are attending in person in the room and remotely using the Zoom application.

I'd like to make a few comments for the benefit of the members.

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

For interpretation for those on Zoom, you have the choice at the bottom of your screen of floor, English or French. For those in the room, you can use the earpiece and select the desired channel. As a reminder, all comments should be addressed through the chair. For members in the room, if you wish to speak, please raise your hand. For members on Zoom, please use the “raise hand” function. The clerk and I will manage the speaking order as best we can. We appreciate your patience and understanding in this regard.

Of course we have PS Beech here because it's his motion.

We last left off with MP Perkins. Then I have MP Blaikie, then PS Beech and then MP Morantz on my list.

We're going to start with MP Perkins.

[Rick Perkins, Conservative, South Shore—St. Margarets, NS]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

The parliamentary secretary is exactly correct. I presume the subamendment to have the Minister of Public Safety appear as part of the broader motion of Mr. Beech to have—

[Philip Lawrence, Conservative, Northumberland—Peterborough South, ON]

My apologies. I have just a brief point of order.

Chair, would you be able to outline, because we might have some lengthy debate, which I think is important, what you were thinking in terms the schedule today?

[The Chair, Liberal, Peter Fonseca]

You know, I think we have resources going right through the full day and right to the end.

[Philip Lawrence, Conservative, Northumberland—Peterborough South, ON]

I will yield the floor back to my colleague, Mr. Perkins. My apologies.

[Rick Perkins, Conservative, South Shore—St. Margarets, NS]

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.

[Daniel Blaikie, NDP, Elmwood—Transcona, MB]

I have just a quick point of order, Mr. Chair.

[The Chair, Liberal, Peter Fonseca]

Please go ahead.

[Daniel Blaikie, NDP, Elmwood—Transcona, MB]

I think this may be a point of order. It may not be. I'd appreciate your reflections on that when I'm done, Mr. Chair.

First of all, I just want to say that I am actually quite enjoying the opportunity to learn a fair bit about this. If you look at the motion that's before us, you see that one of the components is actually to send a number of aspects of the budget implementation act to other committees, exactly because we want to benefit from the subject matter expertise of those committees.

I think what my Conservative colleague here today is doing—perhaps intentionally, perhaps unintentionally—is making an excellent case for passing this motion, because it would enable us to send parts of the budget implementation act to other committees for study by folks who don't need to be taught this, because it's already part of their work.

He has clearly done a lot of excellent work on the committee for fisheries and oceans, and that's why it's so important that parts of the BIA land at those other committees, so that they can have these discussions by members of all parties, who have an intimate knowledge of the various industries.

I take him, actually, to be arguing for the motion and not against it at the moment. I thank him for the compelling demonstration of why passing this motion is so important. I would remind him, or perhaps inform him—because he is, after all, a substituting member of this committee—that the clock is ticking in terms of being able to get the benefit of that subject matter expertise, because the committee has not yet sent a letter to other committees asking them to study....

Last year we did that, but it came late, so that meant that some committees opted not to engage in that study. I think our own study of the bill was poorer for it. That was something we had hoped to remedy with a timely motion this year, and unfortunately this filibuster is getting in the way of that, even as the member makes an excellent case for why that mechanism is so important and should be incorporated as a regular part of the study of budget implementation acts going forward.

I just think it would be good to provide a little context not just for the committee, but also for the individual member as to what's going on in the context of his remarks. I am keen to ensure that it's not just for fisheries and oceans that the budget implementation act gets such a rigorous subject matter expert treatment, but that in fact it happens for all of the issues in the BIA.

I would encourage the member to try to be succinct in providing the things he thinks we need to know so that we can get to a vote and so that we can ensure that all parts of the BIA are as rigorously studied as some of the tangential elements of the BIA that he is exploring at the moment.

[The Chair, Liberal, Peter Fonseca]

MP Blaikie is quite right.

MP Perkins, you may not be aware, but we have a letter prepared and ready to go out to all the committees, like fisheries and oceans, to be able to look at the BIA and see how it impacts them and to be able to possibly look into studying aspects of it. So we've learned about the $5 for a kilogram of eel here, but that would probably be—

[Rick Perkins, Conservative, South Shore—St. Margarets, NS]

It was $5,000.

[The Chair, Liberal, Peter Fonseca]

It's $5,000 for a kilogram of eel. My goodness. Okay, so we'll listen.

[Some hon. members]

You weren't listening.

[The Chair, Liberal, Peter Fonseca]

I heard $5. We will not be seeing eel here for any of our lunches or dinners, because we're very fiscally responsible here at this committee.

But as MP Blaikie said, there is a letter ready to go. It could be sent off to all of the various committees if we can get through this motion, get this passed and get on to the BIA.