Fisheries Committee on June 6th, 2006

[The Chair, Conservative, Gerald Keddy]

Thank you.

Mr. Cummins.

[John Cummins, Conservative, Delta—Richmond East, BC]

Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

[The Chair, Conservative, Gerald Keddy]

Try to keep it to five minutes.

[John Cummins, Conservative, Delta—Richmond East, BC]

We've got lots of time. We have an hour, Mr. Chairman.

Mr. Wild, when my colleague asked you about comments that were made in The Chilliwack Progress, you dismissed them. I don't personally know the report by Robert Freeman, but I have done many interviews with him over the years. From my understanding, I've never found him to be manufacturing information. In that particular story, he quotes you, and he puts in quotation marks the words “local animosity”. He says that you suspect that “local animosity with the Cheam First Nation fueled the sport fishermen's outrage over the gravel removed”.

Are you denying that? I'm asking you, Mr. Wild, are you denying that?

[Jim Wild]

I understand, and I responded to that question earlier.

[John Cummins, Conservative, Delta—Richmond East, BC]

I'm asking you again.

[Jim Wild]

That the local animosity between the two groups caused the problem on this site? No.

[John Cummins, Conservative, Delta—Richmond East, BC]

That it fueled local sport fishermen's outrage.

[Jim Wild]

I don't believe I said that, Mr. Cummins.

[John Cummins, Conservative, Delta—Richmond East, BC]

That's fine.

You also said that Mr. Paterson was on two weeks holiday. Mr. Paterson's comments were that “many of the salmon alevins...had emerged from their nesting sites called redds before the low water levels exposed them”. Do you know that Mr. Paterson made those comments?

[Jim Wild]

I don't believe he made those comments at that time because he was—

[John Cummins, Conservative, Delta—Richmond East, BC]

Would they be accurate?

[Jim Wild]

We start our fry migration work on February 17, and some of the initial sampling at this site by our technician indicated that some of the redds were empty, that the fry had left.

[John Cummins, Conservative, Delta—Richmond East, BC]

For your information, I did attend that site when the causeway was in place, and in the redds that I saw that were dug up, the fish were dead.

There's a public perception here that DFO was negligent in allowing this causeway to be built. The public is rather upset because they see the department as shutting a farmer down, disallowing a farmer from digging and clearing a ditch on his property because they say it's fish habitat, or preventing some other guy from pulling eel grass around his float because somehow or other it's going to damage fish habitat. And yet you guys go ahead and you allow a causeway to be built that destroys probably tens of thousands...or probably even more, if some of the testimony we've heard is correct.

How do you get your mind around that?

[Paul Sprout]

I'd like to come back to why we authorize gravel removal on the Fraser River. This is not—

[John Cummins, Conservative, Delta—Richmond East, BC]

I know why you authorize it.

[Paul Sprout]

This is not the Department of Fisheries and Oceans suggesting we want to remove gravel. It's not the Department of Fisheries and Oceans.

[John Cummins, Conservative, Delta—Richmond East, BC]

That's not the issue.

[Paul Sprout]

There are other institutions, in this case, the province or municipalities, the mayors of municipalities, who are concerned about the removal—

[John Cummins, Conservative, Delta—Richmond East, BC]

That's not the issue here, Mr. Sprout.

[Paul Sprout]

I would like to have the chance to respond to your question.

[John Cummins, Conservative, Delta—Richmond East, BC]

You're wasting our time. I'm asking you why you allowed this to happen.

[Paul Sprout]

And I'm trying to explain.

[John Cummins, Conservative, Delta—Richmond East, BC]

No. We all know why gravel removal is there. There are ways of doing it that are not going to damage the environment, or they're going to minimize it.

You said, for example, that you didn't anticipate that the flow of water would be diminished through these large rocks. Well, if you put an obstruction in the river, the river's not a pipe. It's not forced to go through the holes that are remaining; it will go around. So when you put rocks, large rocks, in the river, the water simply goes around. That's what happened there. It was obvious to the naked eye that the water level was considerably lower below the causeway than it was above.

My questions is simple. Why did you allow that fish habitat to be destroyed in that manner?

[Paul Sprout]

Okay, I'd like to come back to the why, and I need to explain it in two ways.

First of all, the why. Why we allow gravel removal is for flood control and navigational purposes.