Fisheries Committee on Oct. 17th, 2006

[Raynald Blais, Bloc, Gaspésie—Îles-de-la-Madeleine, QC]

I agree with you that a concerted effort is needed.

[The Chair, Conservative, Gerald Keddy]

Thank you, Mr. Blais.

Mr. Stoffer.

[Peter Stoffer, NDP, Sackville—Eastern Shore, NS]

Thank you, Minister Hearn, and your staff, for coming today.

This is regarding the international call by some countries for more time on the high seas for dragging. Your presentation says: “Canada, like many other responsible nations...”.

Now, sir, you indicated when you were in opposition.... I remember your vicious attack on the government and your concerns over the countries of Spain, Portugal, and Russia in their fishing habits when it came to the nose and tail and the Flemish Cap and other areas. You were quite vicious in that regard.

Now we have Australia, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, Norway, and the United States calling for the supporting of the UN moratorium on high seas dragging. Are you saying those countries are not responsible? And yet Spain, Portugal and Russia, countries.... I remind you, sir, of the Olga incident, which happened in your home province. You were quite—and rightfully so—concerned about the Olga and everything else. I'm wondering, sir, how you can justify Canada's position in not supporting a UN moratorium call on high seas dragging.

[Loyola Hearn, Conservative, St. John's South—Mount Pearl, NL]

I'm glad the honourable member raised this question. As I said, we are among many fishing countries in the world—besides Spain and Portugal, there are many others, in fact the majority of the fishing countries in the world—who will not support a ban on ocean dragging. When we finally reach the stage where a resolution is brought to the General Assembly, I think what you will find is that the resolution that is put forward will have consensus from most of the countries, and it will be along the lines of our resolution and certainly not others'.

You also mentioned that the United States is calling for a ban. That was certainly not the case. George Bush called for a ban, and that is not exactly what his people are saying around the table, or what they have come across with in the beginning.

Here are just a few notes. The United States position is misreported in the press—just for the record. We have been repeatedly assured by the U.S. that it is not supportive of a moratorium on bottom trawling. Their position is clearly stated in the memorandum to the Secretary of Commerce, released publicly. The U.S. is aiming to eliminate destructive fishing practices on vulnerable marine ecosystems, not bottom trawling altogether—that's exactly where we are—and they want to ensure that fishing is allowed to continue in the areas where it's not harmful.

We have said quite clearly that we're concerned about a technology that damages habitat, that damages ecosystems, that destroys coral. We abandoned, in fact, at NAFO this year, the dragging on seamounts under our control. There are also other areas—and I've heard some of the members around this table say this—where dragging does absolutely no damage.

Talk to Fishery Products International. They will tell you that they land more flatfish each year on the grounds that were dragged previously, because of the sandy, muddy bottoms. There are sandy, muddy bottoms everywhere in the ocean.

There are also areas that are sensitive, where we should not drag. The United States has used a phrase, “freeze the footprint”. That means, let us not go anywhere else with what could be harmful technology until we have the scientific basis to make a decision whether it would be damaging or not.

I as minister, and other ministers who are in the same boat as I am—you will find the majority of them representing fishing nations who don't have vested interests, by the way, around the world.... They will be in the same boat as we will be ourselves. While we must protect habitat and protect stock, our first priority is to protect our people.

I'm looking at Mr. Matthews' riding, for instance. If a ban comes to dragging.... You can argue that it's only a moratorium on the high seas. We know how it operates. It's the thin edge of the wedge. If it's bad outside, it's bad inside. I'm not a hypocrite, and I won't be one. We said that at NAFO. If we haven't got the guts to do it ourselves, why are we trying to impose it on somebody else?

[Peter Stoffer, NDP, Sackville—Eastern Shore, NS]

Okay, thank you.

[Loyola Hearn, Conservative, St. John's South—Mount Pearl, NL]

And if you're going to say to your people in Nova Scotia, who depend on dragging, that seamounts and concerns in somebody else's backyard are more important than concerns in your own, then I'm not in that boat.

[Peter Stoffer, NDP, Sackville—Eastern Shore, NS]

Mr. Minister, I thank you for that, but I also recall, and I bring to your attention, what you said many times, and I agreed with you many times that we should be using the precautionary principle, and I don't think we're doing that in this regard.

I have another question for you. You've talked about the estimates, and the true numbers will be coming out, but you have to help me understand this. I've got your 2006-07 estimates and report on plans and priorities. On page 31 I'm looking at the science estimates for this year of $152.9 million for 2006-07, and in 2008-09 it goes down to $138.3 million. That shows to me a reduction.

Secondly, in terms of full-time equivalents--these are the people who do the science--this year it's estimated at 1,043 full-time equivalents and in 2008-09 it's down to 990. I switch over to page 28, financial resources for fisheries management. This is the estimates now, and this year it's slated at $379.5 million, in 2008-09 $282 million. There are full-time equivalents of 1,502 and, in 2008-09, 1,473.

Help me out, and correct me if I'm wrong, but this shows a reduction in budgets in the next couple of years. Are the estimates that we have for 2006-07 the correct figures or not?

[Loyola Hearn, Conservative, St. John's South—Mount Pearl, NL]

Thank you, Mr. Stoffer.

Mr. Chair, let me make a brief comment and then I'll have the officials go through the figures.

You mentioned the precautionary approach on harvesting. I totally agree with you. I've said it before and I still do. In fact, if you go to what happened at the NAFO meetings you will see that NAFO, with our pressure and some cooperation, brought in the UNFA. We've always said we should embody the UNFA principles and that would give us some clout. We must proceed using the precautionary approach, using science as a basis for decision-making. I totally agree with that and I just wanted to get that on the record. I'm sure Mr.Stoffer and I are singing from the same hymn book on that.

On the specific question on the figures, I'll ask one of the officials to go over that.

[Larry Murray]

I'd ask Mr. Chair to recognize Mr. Cal Hegge, who is the department's senior financial officer. I'd ask Cal to provide some detail.

[Cal Hegge, A/Assistant Deputy Minister, Human Resources and Corporate Services, Department of Fisheries and Oceans]

Mr. Stoffer, I believe you were quoting from the report on plans and priorities part III.

[Peter Stoffer, NDP, Sackville—Eastern Shore, NS]

That is correct.

[Cal Hegge]

The information and the figures you quoted obviously are accurate, but they are based on information known at that time. The RPP was put together a number of months ago and it doesn't reflect reality in terms of what we will actually spend this year or even next year. It's based on what known information we had at the time. The adjustments, of course--and this was alluded to earlier--will come from additional MCs or Treasury Board submissions that are actually going to provide the funding to the department.

We took your figure of $97.5 million, I believe it was, and I went to the table on page 42, which again shows reductions in the area of science and fisheries management. I think those were a couple of areas you had highlighted in your information with the media and you're quite right, but as has already been indicated by the minister and the deputy, some of these reductions were planned reductions in accordance with the original MCs that had provided the funding.

I'll give you one example, because it is a fairly large item with respect to fisheries management. Between this year and next year's planned spending there is a reduction of $62 million with respect to Marshall. That's the biggest chunk within the fisheries management area. There are other reductions in here that are attributable to the ERC, the Expenditure Review Committee, initiatives, some of which we're not proceeding with, but based on the information at the time the money has already come out of reference level. So you'll see a figure in there that relates to the ERC implementation, and that included some FTE reductions, which, as the minister has indicated earlier, we're not going to proceed with in all cases.

To go back to Mr. Byrne's request, we will provide you the detailed information that will track the reductions. I just wanted to highlight a couple in the area of fish management and science, because that seemed to be one of your preoccupations.

[Peter Stoffer, NDP, Sackville—Eastern Shore, NS]

If I may ask what I think is a simple question--

[The Chair, Conservative, Gerald Keddy]

You're four minutes over time.

[Peter Stoffer, NDP, Sackville—Eastern Shore, NS]

I'm done, sir. Thank you.

[The Chair, Conservative, Gerald Keddy]

I've been very generous with all parties on time and I'm going to continue that with the Conservative member.

Mr. Lunney.

[James Lunney, Conservative, Nanaimo—Alberni, BC]

Thank you very much, Mr. Chair, we appreciate it. We try to be very collegial in this committee; the issues are important to our constituents, and certainly to the people on the coast, so we want to continue in that spirit of collegiality.

On that point, I have to take objection to my colleague's remarks about “vicious” comments by the minister in times past. I know that some of my colleagues opposite are finding that language probably misrepresents a little bit any presentation.... Aggressive perhaps, but vicious never.

That said, Minister, in reference to Mr. Stoffer's remarks about bottom trawling, I would just say that certainly in my part of the country as well, on the west coast, it's an issue that people are taking very seriously. We are concerned that it's a technology from another era, when we had less information about what goes on on the bottom. I know there are very serious concerns about this.

I like the phrase you referred to earlier, the language of “freeze the footprint”. I think there are areas where we know that damage is minimal. We talk about establishing corridors, which would probably involve some discipline, some supervision. I think that's a direction we certainly would be well advised to go in, and I just leave that comment in support of the concerns raised by Mr. Stoffer.

I also want to say how much we appreciate the investment in the coast guard; certainly we do in our part of the country, and I'm sure our east coast colleagues do as well. We had the new commissioner here at committee just recently. We are all appreciative that there is an investment going into coast guard, with the modernization program and the ten new vessels.

On a personal note, I want to say that I had the pleasure of being out in Bamfield on the coast, less than a month ago, to commission one of our new lifeboats, the 47-foot boat Cape MacKay, with the assistant commissioner for the Pacific region, Terry Tebb. That's a big deal for our community there, for the coast guard stations, that they have the equipment to go out and effect a rescue in some of the very trying conditions we have on the west coast, as I know our colleagues have on the east coast as well. That investment in those new lifeboats is certainly appreciated.

I want to just pick up on a couple of issues raised at the Coastal Community Network, I guess about two weekends ago, where our coastal communities gathered from the west coast. Two items related to fisheries came on the agenda.

One issue--we discussed it quite a bit in your time here on committee, Mr. Minister--is the hake fishery. The mid-water fish going past our coast has become more important in recent years. There's the issue related to the factory ships. There are still concerns. Of course, coastal communities would prefer to see, as would our colleagues opposite, the fish processed onshore. We know that the fish have been a little bit.... Maybe they're smarter than some people think; they actually have been moving, and were caught way off the north end of the island. In that case, it sometimes is hard to get the factory ships, which our commercial fishermen regard as a safety valve, into the shore-based facilities. But it does raise concerns.

I know the new factor now is that we have some Canadian factory vessels participating as well, providing employment for Canadians. I think that's preferable to foreign nationals being there, but there are still concerns about science related to the biomass of this vulnerable species. When we look at the science, they say so much, but the Americans then decide they're going to take more than science allows, and we traditionally take 25% of what they take. This putting unnecessary pressure on the biomass is going to get us into trouble, as it has in other fisheries when we overtask the resource.

The other concern with that hake fishery—I'll ask you for a response later--is the volumetric measurement. When we process onshore, you can measure every fish, you can weigh every fish. But with factory ships, whether they're Canadian or from some other nation, you're estimating what's in every haul that comes off a vessel. I'm hard pressed to imagine that the resource is not being exploited by volumetric measurement. That remains a concern for coastal communities.

Those would be my first remarks.

[Loyola Hearn, Conservative, St. John's South—Mount Pearl, NL]

Thank you very much, Mr. Lunney, Mr. Chair. I certainly want to thank my colleague for coming to my defence, first of all.

[Some hon. members]

Oh, oh!

[Loyola Hearn, Conservative, St. John's South—Mount Pearl, NL]

In my response to Mr. Stoffer, where we couldn't get into all sides of the bottom trawling...I might have been a little more pointed than I would have liked to be or should be. Don't think for a minute that bottom trawling doesn't disturb us; it does, absolutely. However, if you look at--and again I can use any problem--Nova Scotia, the west coast, certainly Newfoundland and Labrador, many of our fishermen presently use some form of bottom trawling.

If today we banned bottom trawling, Mr. Byrne's riding would be practically wiped out because of the shrimp fishery, Mr. Matthews' because of the ground fishery, and parts of Mr. Stoffer's area on both, Even P.E.I., which has shrimp...I don't think they fish it themselves, but they would be affected, and certainly on the west coast...many of our methods of fishing.

Does that mean we shouldn't improve the technology? We should be. In fact, as we speak, there are companies in this country, companies in our own province, that have major advances in developing less harmful technology in the fishery. That's one way we have to go.

Are there areas where we are presently dragging, where we probably shouldn't? There probably are, and if there are, we should deal with that. But we just can't go out overnight and wipe out an industry, which means you wipe out communities. So somewhere in between, we move forward to doing what's right.

In relation to the coast guard, the extra money I mentioned, $45 million in operations.... You're not hearing about coast guard boats being tied up this year because they don't have fuel: we put money where it's needed. We have extra surveillance in all our areas: the north, the west, and on the east coast. We've added tremendously to our fleet. You yourself talked about being at the christening of the Cape MacKay, and I want to make sure our members don't think we're naming our boats after our parliamentarians--we're not, we're naming them after geographic capes throughout the country, and the ones on the west coast are named after capes.

[Gerry Byrne, Liberal, Humber—St. Barbe—Baie Verte, NL]

The capes were named after politicians.

[Loyola Hearn, Conservative, St. John's South—Mount Pearl, NL]

Well, they might have been; you're probably right, Mr. Byrne.

I was there for the christening of theCape Kuper this past Thursday, in fact, in the Victoria area. The interesting thing about that is that the woman who christened the boat is a first nations woman whose son is one of the crew members. We have two first nations people serving as the crew. It's a training project as they develop the crew for the new boat, and that's a major success.

One of our people on the west coast, Les Palmer, our coast guard member, was just awarded the Cross of Valour for saving a couple of lives by plowing through snow to reach two people who had been shipwrecked, by keeping them alive until help came. So there are so many good stories about the coast guard, but I don't have to tell you that, because during our trip, particularly on the west coast, it was you who garnered the information that gave us this incentive to move forward with the coast guard.

As for the results in relation to hake, maybe David would add on to that, but before we get into that, just let me say a couple of things in relation to the estimates of catch in the hake.

The hake, which was worth nothing a few years ago, is something like the Greenland halibut or turbot on the east coast, which nobody bothered with and now everybody wants to bother with it. Again, regarding getting value for that, Mr. Stoffer certainly has been very interested in what goes on in Nunavut in relation to that, and that is a major issue. We have to try to get maximum benefit from our resource, and we're not doing it.

I'll make sure there's some time left for Mr. Bevan.

[David Bevan, Assistant Deputy Minister, Fisheries and Aquaculture Management, Department of Fisheries and Oceans]

On hake, we have reached a tentative arrangement with the Americans and are living by that arrangement while they ratify the treaty, so the sharing is no longer an issue. We don't, therefore, have unilateral quotas set by Canada and the U.S. that add up to more than the scientific advice. So that's good news.

On the issue of factory ships versus onshore processing, we have a balance that we need to negotiate there with all the parties. The fishermen, as you may be aware, get paid more for taking their fish to factory ships, and of course the plants and the communities want more employment in the processing operations, but they can't always process all the fish. So there is a series of discussions that happen each year relevant to what the markets are looking like that year, what the price differences are, and what the right share should be to maximize the value of that fishery for Canadians.

Also, on the estimate of catch, that is always a challenge. We do have people on-board to verify the estimates, but I agree that it's not a precise science in that we can't measure it to the pound or to the kilo, but we do have reasonable confidence that we are, collectively with the Americans, living within the scientific advice.

[James Lunney, Conservative, Nanaimo—Alberni, BC]

Thank you very much. I appreciate those responses.

Another issue that came out of the Coastal Community Network, Minister, involves the West Coast Vancouver Island Aquatic Management Board--a very long name for this organization. This is a board that has involved local consultation--something we've talked about in this committee forever--and there's a pilot program that has been going on for a number of years. Again, they're concerned that there's no commitment--and maybe you can correct me on that, maybe there has been a commitment that I'm not aware of--to renew the funding for the West Coast Vancouver Island Aquatic Management Board.

Because this involves the regional governments, the first nations, and every sector of the fishery--sport, commercial, and so on--there's a lot of interest locally, and we feel that the information coming from this group could perhaps be better utilized by the department. The community would like to have some assurance that funding will continue for the program and perhaps the data coming in from that will go on.

Before I ask for a response to that, I'll also raise an issue that has caused some concern here--it's coming out of coast guards, so hold on to that one. When the commissioner was asked last time he was here about cutbacks to our stations, the only one that was mentioned by name was MCTS Tofino. Of course, this is a base in my riding that monitors all the vessel traffic coming into the strait. There has been pressure for years on least-cost analyses. Victoria picks them up after they come through the Juan de Fuca Strait, and they go down....

I simply want to inform the minister that I have a letter coming your way, which you won't have received yet. There is some action there regarding the base because of a land claims treaty that's moving ahead that involves the land that the base is on in a land swap with the province, which may be in a position of giving up land for a first nations settlement. They want to exchange land that the base actually sits on and some of the surrounding area that's under provincial control. The municipality, Minister, is committed to maintaining the base and would like to see that base expanded. From my perspective, the west coast of Vancouver Island is well served by MCTS Tofino, by the officers there.

I know there's a concern that the land values have gone up so much that it's hard for some of the officers to find housing in the area. If the land switches to the province, there may well be an opportunity to provide housing for our officers in land adjacent to the base. Even on the base, I understand there's a home not being used because of asbestos concerns.

In terms of monitoring our coast, we're hopeful the department will take the view that the base should be expanded and modernized. We know the radar is doing a great job--it has about a 60-mile reach--but a large part of our coast is not being monitored. Northern Vancouver Island and that base with modern equipment is particularly well positioned to do that monitoring.

We hope that will be taken into consideration. I know it's a big concern in our coastal community.

[Loyola Hearn, Conservative, St. John's South—Mount Pearl, NL]

Thank you, Mr. Lunney.

Let me assure you on that. I know there's an issue surrounding the base. Absolutely no decision has been taken on that. No decision will be taken on that until you're consulted. We look at all the factors involved, and the last thing we want to do is go moving bases, unless for some reason there's no other choice. But as I say, absolutely no decision has been taken on that and it certainly won't be done without your involvement.

In relation to the different groups and agencies, certainly we're assessing the applications for funding for a number of them that do a tremendous amount of work in helping us in the fishery.

One of the things, and it might be something to think about in your various regions, coming out of the summit.... I hate using that word, but that's what it was called. And to an extent it was, because--for the first time ever, I would suggest, certainly in our province--it brought together all the players. I went to the meeting mainly--and I even said it publicly--figuring I was going into one big bitching session, where you get everybody at the one table. It didn't happen. People parked their agendas at the door, and when the going was tough and we needed to get people thinking about how to move forward, that's exactly what they did.

Sometimes we have so many involved at different levels. You get a lot of volunteer groups coming on the scene and they're looking for support. It sometimes can get to the point where it's a bit confusing. Every now and then you have to stop and coordinate efforts. That I think is what needs to be done, but it needs to be done at a local level. It's not a decision made by Ottawa to tell B.C. or to tell Nova Scotia or anybody else how they should run their affairs. But we are the ones quite often left with the responsibility of decision-making and funding, whatever. When we do it collectively and work together, it just makes so much more sense. When you do sit around the table, it's amazing what comes out of that.

We certainly will look forward to working with them, certainly in relation to B.C. more than anywhere else, on our oceans action plan, which involves so many of the groups and agencies out there and the volunteers who are working with us, to achieve the type of protection and advancement that we need in relation to habitat and the preservation of our stocks. There are a lot of good things happening. We usually hear the bad, but for every bad story we hear, there are several good ones. The good people are working on it, and they haven't time to complain.