Fisheries Committee on June 5th, 2008

[The Chair, Conservative, Fabian Manning]

Thank you.

Thank you, Mr. Stoffer.

Mr. Calkins.

[Blaine Calkins, Conservative, Wetaskiwin, AB]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

I appreciate your coming here, Mr. Thompson.

I'm going to continue in the same vein, and if we have any time left over, I'll share it with one of my colleagues.

I'm going to talk about aquatic invasive species. I went through the chapter in your audit assessment, and there wasn't a whole lot of talk about the Centre of Expertise for Aquatic Risk Assessment, which has basically been started up in response to some of the issues we're dealing with--aquatic invasive species. There doesn't seem to be much assessment in your report on that, just some brief comments. I'm wondering whether you could elaborate anything further for the committee. It looks like the department is at least trying; it's starting to move in that direction. Could you talk about anything specific insofar as that centre of expertise is concerned?

[Ron Thompson]

Mr. Chairman, perhaps I might ask my colleague Andrew Ferguson to comment on that. We looked a bit at it, but not very much.

[Andrew Ferguson]

Yes, it was really a cornerstone of the department's response to our chapter, where they mentioned that they had established this new organization to do the kinds of things we had been recommending the department do. So we have not yet audited the results of that organization, as it is relatively new. What we can say to date is that the number of risk assessments completed has been very small. I think we found eight, in relation a much bigger problem of 180 or so species. So we'll be looking at that in our next follow-up to see whether or not that agency has made progress.

[Blaine Calkins, Conservative, Wetaskiwin, AB]

So there has been some movement there.

You also brought up and talked a little bit about Bill C-32. I'm just wondering, has your department given any assessment to you now? Of course, if you take a look at the bill, which is not law yet, it basically empowers the minister or the Governor in Council to make regulations pertaining to aquatic invasive species. But is there anything further you can elaborate on insofar as any potential changes to the Fisheries Act or a revamping of the Fisheries Act are concerned when it comes to dealing with aquatic invasive species?

Could you comment on any shortfalls in the current legislation or the current regulations dealing with them? Is it a legislative problem? We talked a little bit about whether or not it's a financial problem or a manpower or a resource problem. We talked a bit about whether or not it's an interdepartmental issue. Your report documents quite clearly the way ballast water works, and it's no secret that ballast water is one of the key contributing factors to the movement of aquatic species.

The other thing we talked about is the $8 million out of the $10 million, the 80% of the money that's basically going to the sea lamprey. From a biological perspective, there are some things you can control and some things you can't control. You can chemically control things. You can use biological controls, but what you usually end up doing is inviting in another non-native species to control the original non-native species. Sometimes, if you ask people in Australia what they did to control rabbits, it just goes on and on from there.

The last thing I want to talk about is the socio-economic impact. Has any analysis been done of that? If you take a look at just the Toronto area alone, there are four million people who live right on the shore of one of the Great Lakes. If you take a look at the number of people who live in southern Ontario, which borders on most of the Great Lakes, you could say that roughly 37% of the population of Canada lives along those lakes. And if you take a look at the economic impact of the sea lamprey, which has moved into the freshwater lakes, and the impact it's had on those lakes, maybe from an economic perspective the money is being spent where it has the best economic impact.

I'm just wondering if you could speak to any of those types of concerns.

[Ron Thompson]

Let me, if I may, talk a bit about each of those.

Certainly on Bill C-32 and the act that's now in place, we would not be in a position to comment on the pros and cons of a piece of legislation, either an existing act or one that is being proposed, unless it had sections in it that dealt with our particular office. Otherwise, we stay away from that, because if we get into it, we'd be heavily into policy. Debating the merits of a particular piece of legislation is your purview, and certainly not ours. So I'm afraid I'm going to have to duck that, if you don't mind, other than to say that it was interesting to see that aquatic invasive species are in this draft bill.

In terms of the complexity of the issue, I don't think anybody is suggesting there's a quick fix to all of this stuff. If there were, it would have been fixed years ago—and maybe $2 million would be enough to fix it. But again, what we're not finding when we do our audit is DFO doing the kind of risk analysis and assessment that would maybe get to the bottom of what could be fixed, and what could be done in a more thoughtful way. I think that's where one would want to have them here to talk to them and explore with the officials why they're doing what they're doing and not doing something a bit more.

On the socio-economic impact, absolutely.... I have a cottage north of here, and a cottage is a cottage, but I remember very well three years ago when our lake was suddenly full of Austrian milfoil, I think it was, and you could almost walk across the lake—and it's a big lake. Now the milfoil is gone, but when you think of the effect it has on just weekend warriors like me—who are really very small potatoes, in a sense, though it's very personal—these things really do have a huge impact on people's enjoyment. They have a huge impact in the dollar sense on industry. It's into the billions—not the millions, but the billions—every year. You're right that the Lake Ontario region is heavily affected by them.

This is an example where—and Mr. Vaughan certainly knows about this better than I do—the concept of sustainable development really comes into play, the merging together of the various aspects of this concept of sustainable development. There are economic aspects of these aquatics, there are social aspects of the aquatics, and there certainly are economic aspects of them. And somebody, somewhere should be doing an analysis to determine what the right decisions should be in addressing them, because you probably can't do everything at once with these aquatic invaders.

But you can't just look at the environmental concern; you really should be looking as well at the economic effects and at the social effects. That's the essence of sustainable development, and that's something that we would hope government departments like DFO would be practising in a very proactive way.

[Blaine Calkins, Conservative, Wetaskiwin, AB]

Thank you.

I'll pass it over to one of my colleagues.

[The Chair, Conservative, Fabian Manning]

Go ahead, Mr. Kamp.

[Randy Kamp, Conservative, Pitt Meadows—Maple Ridge—Mission, BC]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Thank you, gentlemen, for coming.

I want to echo Mr. Stoffer's best wishes on your retirement, and I'm sure everything will go well there. And I welcome Mr. Vaughan to this position.

I just want to begin with some process questions. Can you tell us, just briefly, what your involvement was in terms of working with the department in the preparation of this report, which is basically a follow-up to previous reports from 2004 and earlier? Then can you tell me, now that you've presented these reports, what you've done with the department subsequently? What kinds of meetings have you had? What kind of response have you had from them? How cooperative did you find them, and so on?

[Ron Thompson]

Thank you very much for that question.

The follow-up is an interesting process. We have a methodology we use, which we communicate to all departments, to go about assessing whether we, as auditors, are satisfied with the progress. We take a look at what actions have been taken since we made our recommendation or raised the finding, and we place them on a scale of one to five. Five would be fully implementing a recommendation; two would be partway along, and then there is three, and so on. We then sit back and take a look at how difficult it would be for the department to actually implement the recommendation or address the finding. Some of them are devilishly difficult to do.

At the end of the day, we sit back and look at those two factors and ask if we are satisfied or not. Now, if it's a very complicated issue, we might be satisfied with progress at the three level, if that's all we could reasonably expect would be done by that time. We would report to you that we're satisfied with progress on it. So that's a bit of the process.

We send our teams out to actually re-audit the issue that gave rise to the recommendation in the first place. So all the rigour we would apply in doing a performance audit in the first instance we repeat when we audit a second time.

We communicate to departments what we've found, generally in point form. We will sit down with them and say that we've looked at these ten recommendations, for example. We don't try to put words around our findings at this point. We simply say that this is where we're satisfied and this is where we're not satisfied and why. And we have a good discussion, right up to the assistant deputy and sometimes the deputy minister level.

We generally find, in those discussions, that there are no surprises. Departments know how they've done in implementing recommendations, and they're generally not surprised. Sometimes there's a bit of a surprise in seeing it all in one place, but beyond that, there's not a whole lot.

Then we put some words around it and send the words back to the departments to have a look, because sometimes we can use words that we think communicate fairly the finding, but they in fact do a disservice to the department. So we want to be sure that we're using wording that is going to help move this file along rather than hinder it. At the end of the process, if we have made a new recommendation in a report, we ask the deputy minister to respond to us in writing.

The process works well. It takes about a year. Our relations with departments are really very good. They are very cooperative with us. All the departments we audited this time for the status report have been extremely cooperative.

I'll just give you one last example of what we do subsequently. We haven't done much since we issued the report on March 6. In getting ready for this hearing I went over to see officials at the Department of Fisheries and Oceans, and they were very good about it. We talked about issues that might come up. I warned them that I was going to try to suggest to the committee that you might call them as witnesses at some point. They laughed and said that they were sort of expecting that. We asked them whether anything new had happened since we issued the report, but since it was only two months ago, there wasn't very much.

So that's a bit about the process and a bit about relations. It works well, and relations are sound.

[The Chair, Conservative, Fabian Manning]

Thank you, Mr. Thompson.

I believe that Mr. MacAulay is next.

[Lawrence MacAulay, Liberal, Cardigan, PE]

Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman.

I would like to welcome you here, and, like everybody else, wish Mr. Thompson a great retirement. We around the table here are trying to prevent that from happening. At least I am.

You've dealt with invasive species a lot. In our region--I come from Prince Edward Island--the blue mussel is a big industry, and this is a major problem. Can you tell us why the clubbed tunicate is different from others? Have you dealt with that? What needs to happen? Have you evaluated these pilot projects that have been put in place, and would you have any suggestions?

A very few years ago we didn't have this at all. And now we have it, and as you know, it's a massive issue. Could you elaborate a little on that?

[Ron Thompson]

I'll offer a comment, Mr. Chairman, and then turn it over to my colleague Mr. Ferguson, if you don't mind.

In terms of evaluating what caused it in the first place--

[Lawrence MacAulay, Liberal, Cardigan, PE]

Not to interrupt you, but I believe DFO could take the credit for that. I don't know if you discussed that when you were over there.

[Ron Thompson]

We would want to, and in doing this work we have had a look at what the responsible departments are doing to do exactly that, to evaluate the cause, to try to figure out a solution, and to try to prevent similar invasives from coming in. So we're looking at how the relevant departments, in this case DFO, are organizing themselves and managing themselves to deal with this issue. We wouldn't do the evaluation ourselves.

Maybe I could ask Mr. Ferguson to comment in a bit more detail.

[Andrew Ferguson]

Yes, I would say the club tunicate is one of hundreds of species Mr. Thompson already mentioned, and we did go to P.E.I. to have a look at that particular case. Our observations and recommendations are at a more global level, because there are, as I said, hundreds of these things. The green crab's another one, and we're all aware of zebra mussels. Each one of those species causes economic as well as social harm in the communities where they exist.

But we point to the Department of Fisheries and Oceans to tell us what precisely the risk is and what the response should be to that issue in terms of control and eradication at this point. I think we know from what we read in the background material, but once these organisms are established, it's very difficult, if not impossible, to eradicate them.

So the whole focus needs to be on prevention. Once they're here, it's a management issue. How do you control them, how do you minimize their negative impacts?

[Lawrence MacAulay, Liberal, Cardigan, PE]

It's obvious you didn't see how massive an issue this is in P.E.I.

[Andrew Ferguson]

We did--

[Lawrence MacAulay, Liberal, Cardigan, PE]

A small place, but a big industry.

[Andrew Ferguson]

As Mr. Thompson mentioned, over $1 billion a year in economic impact in Canada is the information we have that, as I said, is background to our audit. This is one industry that's very important. Lobster fishery is another threatened fishery.

[Lawrence MacAulay, Liberal, Cardigan, PE]

Okay, thank you very much.

Also, were international trade agreements covered by your audit? I heard you mention the Atlantic tuna agreement, Mr. Thompson. I'm interested in what part that would play. There's always a concern in what is fished, how much is fished, how unfair the amount of quota is that's given to certain areas like Prince Edward Island fishermen.

What impact would you have...? When you evaluate international agreements, we think about the WTO, and you're also aware of some of the measures the WTO were putting in place. We're very concerned about government making sure these are not agreed to by the Government of Canada, like fisheries subsidies.

Would you look at fisheries subsidies, employment insurance, capital gains tax exemptions? You're aware of all of these. Would you have a recommendation on these issues as to what effect it would have on the fishery, or would you not?

[Ron Thompson]

Thank you for that question.

Perhaps I could answer this way. The audit we reported in chapter 8 is quite limited. It really had to do with whether members of Parliament and the Canadian people were being informed fairly and in a substantive way about the various agreements we've signed internationally. So a disclosure of robust information really was the issue, as opposed to anything else.

In terms of the issues you raised on whether we should go one way or another in signing agreements or what they should maintain, we did not look at that, sir.

[Lawrence MacAulay, Liberal, Cardigan, PE]

The tuna issue, you--

[The Chair, Conservative, Fabian Manning]

Thank you, Mr. MacAulay.

Mr. Lévesque.

[Yvon Lévesque, Bloc, Abitibi—Baie-James—Nunavik—Eeyou, QC]

Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

Mr. Thompson, can you hear me?