Fisheries Committee on Nov. 9th, 2006

[Robert Courtney]

Yes, that's all that's marketable right now to harvest. In taking those, how long would it be before it affected the overall herd? What's your estimation? How many would you have to take out and how long would it take before you saw a drop in the overall herd?

[Dr. Mike Hammill]

Without doing the math, the easy answer is that you take all the pups that are born--that's the simplest thing--but you're not going to see any change in population size for about four to five years. It takes four to five years before they become mature, and it's at that stage that you start to see the impact of your culling program, if that's what you want to do. You either do the pups, take a lot, or you would address your efforts towards reproducing females to have a more immediate impact.

[The Chair, Conservative, Gerald Keddy]

Thank you, Mr. Hammill.

We have a bit of time here, not a lot, and I'm going to ask my colleagues to try to keep their questions very brief. I know members still have some questions they'd like to ask. Perhaps we could just ask one question each; I know that's not a lot for the members who have not had an opportunity to speak, but it's an additional eight questions around the table. If we did that, we could finish up the last round and it would still put us over time.

[A voice]

Excuse me, but I'm...[Inaudible--Editor]

[The Chair, Conservative, Gerald Keddy]

[Inaudible--Editor]...to sit at the table. The difficulty with committee always--and it's no different here from anywhere else--

[A voice]

[Inaudible--Editor]

[The Chair, Conservative, Gerald Keddy]

I call the meeting to order.

The difficulty is to give everybody an opportunity to speak. It's never easy. We've gone overtime on every meeting; well, we'll go overtime on this one. We have another meeting after this. We ask people to present to the committee so that we can have an organized forum. I realize somebody is always left out, and it's never easy, but it's the way the meeting's run, and it's the only way you can run the meeting and have order.

We're going to go for our final round of questions. We'll have a quick question. There is a lot of opportunity after the meeting for the audience to ask individual questions to the members of committee or to anybody who appeared here.

Mr. Cuzner, would you go ahead.

[Rodger Cuzner, Liberal, Cape Breton—Canso, NS]

Ms. MacKenzie, I'd like to ask for a little bit more information on your organization. When did you form? What was its genesis? Who makes up the board, and what access do you have to science? When did you fire up, and what prompted the fire-up of your society?

[Debbie MacKenzie]

It's a non-profit society. It was formed two and a half years ago.

[Rodger Cuzner, Liberal, Cape Breton—Canso, NS]

How long?

[Debbie MacKenzie]

It was two and a half years ago, in the spring of 2004. It's concerned with holistic conservation of the ocean, and it's triggered by the awareness of the collapsing ecosystem.

I have a background of being born and raised and living all my life in the fishing industry. My father's a DFO scientist of the type who used to do fish inspection. He was the head of the fish inspection lab in Halifax. He's now retired. Fish inspection protocols were for cold-blooded fish, which cannot carry bacterial threats as the seals can, because they're mammals.

That's one part of it. That's not the thing that caused the Grey Seal Conservation Society to form; it was ocean conservation of the ecosystem, triggered by seeing the loss of...everything. My original concern was the groundfisheries; why won't they rebuild? The starvation was a shock to me, when I found out that they were starving. My father explained this to me, and I thought it was unbelievable, but now it is actually supported by DFO analysis.

When the issue was raised here of a cod stock that diminished its tonnage when there was no fishing, the obvious negative factor had to be that the seals were eating them. That's not what the ecological analysis shows. The scientists at the Bedford Institute, Ken Frank and others, have done great studies, and they now know that it's a lack of food. When that--

[Rodger Cuzner, Liberal, Cape Breton—Canso, NS]

Would your society have members from the Bedford Institute sitting--

[Debbie MacKenzie]

No, but we communicate with them. We've been over and made presentations to them. We're allied with a few people at Dalhousie University.

I'm the main researcher. I've been reading all the science I can find, all that DFO and others have written for 10 years. What I'm seeing is this. Somebody said here that we had an ecosystem in a tailspin, and we do. The signs of overall decline are massive.

One thing that southwest Nova fishermen should be aware of, besides the poor condition of the fish, is that the Irish moss has disappeared, and when the seaweed's not growing right and the barnacles are disappearing, when the productivity's coming down, that's the ecosystem in a tailspin.

The ecological studies on predators show that they're important to maintaining the structure and function, so it's mainly about protecting predators, because the public thinks the predators are negative.

[Rodger Cuzner, Liberal, Cape Breton—Canso, NS]

Thank you.

[The Chair, Conservative, Gerald Keddy]

Thank you, Mr. Cuzner. That's about as brief as I've ever seen you at a meeting.

Mr. Byrne is next.

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

Thank you very much.

I want to thank the presenters as well; it was extremely well done.

Cause and effect--that's really one of the big issues we're talking about here. We're trying to debate cause and trying to debate what the consequences of things are.

Mike, I'm going to give you an opportunity to redeem yourself in terms of talking about general scientific principle and objective scientific protocols. In a food chain, is it the top of the food chain that determines the bottom of the food chain, or the bottom of the food chain that determines the top of the food chain?

[Dr. Mike Hammill]

You guys make it tough, because you put a five-minute limitation on everything. You just threw out a motherhood statement of a question.

From what we've seen so far in the ocean, it's very hard to tease out the big controlling factor. There are obviously some bottom-up effects and some top-down effects. These are the largest seal populations in eastern Canada that we've seen in 50 to 100 years; for grey seals it's probably 200 years. These large predators are here.

A lot of the other fish predators are missing, and these are important. Shark populations are down, but we don't have good numbers, and they are seal predators. There are interactions.

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

In terms of geographic distribution, we've noted that grey seals have been present in west Nova Scotia for some time, but not in the numbers we currently see. Is that indicative of the fact that they've grown? As the herds have grown exponentially, the populations have been evenly disbursed in an equal magnitude or proportion throughout the Maritimes or Atlantic Canada, or has there been an unusual increase in distribution in a particular region of the Maritimes?

[Dr. Mike Hammill]

What we're seeing is a natural filling in of what was once the grey seal range.

What we've seen in the last 50 years was that the population was largely 70% in the Gulf of St. Lawrence and 30% on the Scotian Shelf. Because the seals were breeding on the ice, this is an area that was not accessible to any hunting.

Since then there has been the causeway. Also Sable Island has been protected, so what few pups you had there have been allowed to increase. They were always there. Many years ago in the 1700s they were there, so now they've just built up. Now roughly 80% of the population is born on Sable Island and 20% in the Gulf of St. Lawrence.

In recent times, we've been seeing a shift. As far as the longer-term distribution of seals is concerned, they're probably just filling in what was once a normal range.

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

Thank you.

[The Chair, Conservative, Gerald Keddy]

Thank you, Mr. Byrne.

Mr. Matthews, did you have a question?

[Bill Matthews, Liberal, Random—Burin—St. George's, NL]

I have just a short question, Mr. Chairman.

First, I'd like to thank the witnesses for coming and for their presentations.

I think it was you, Mr. Stoddard, who mentioned the potential 450 metric tons of frozen seal meat, grey seals. How many grey seals would that represent in a harvest?

[Peter Stoddard]

You've put me on the spot now.

[Bill Matthews, Liberal, Random—Burin—St. George's, NL]

Just roughly. I was trying to get my mind around how many grey seals you were talking about.

[Peter Stoddard]

Your average grey seal can grow to 300 or 400 pounds. The yield on a seal I'm not sure of. What would you yield from a seal if you were to skin and gut a seal and have just meat, clear bone?