Evidence of meeting #11 for Fisheries and Oceans in the 40th Parliament, 2nd Session. (The original version is on Parliament’s site, as are the minutes.) The winning word was travel.
A recording is available from Parliament.
Bloc
Meili Faille Bloc Vaudreuil—Soulanges, QC
Given that we have an expert on the seal hunt with us, can you tell us what has happened in the last few months? The hunt is now over.
Deputy Minister, Department of Fisheries and Oceans
The hunt ended in the Îles-de-la-Madeleine yesterday. Now, it will move more to the north in the Gulf. It will get to Cape Breton by Friday or the weekend, and to the Basse-Côte-Nord after that. Later, it will reach what we call the Front of Newfoundland.
Bloc
Meili Faille Bloc Vaudreuil—Soulanges, QC
How is the business end going at the moment? Can you update us on that?
Deputy Minister, Department of Fisheries and Oceans
We know that the people in the Îles-de-la-Madeleine are pleased with the price they are being offered. As for the business internationally, the only reductions we are noticing are not a result of our trade disputes with Europe, but of the economic problems that people are having everywhere at the moment. I have been told that the hunters in the Îles-de-la-Madeleine were satisfied with the price they were receiving. For Newfoundland, we are not yet sure, because there is still quite a large inventory left over from last year.
Bloc
Meili Faille Bloc Vaudreuil—Soulanges, QC
Right.
I would like to bring up a completely different matter that interests me personally. It concerns the user fees that fisherman have to pay for their licences. Members of Parliament have been receiving complaints about the lack of transparency in the consultation process. Since you are here this morning, can you tell us about the fees for getting licences? Have you held consultations recently? Can we expect an adjustment in the licence fees?
Deputy Minister, Department of Fisheries and Oceans
You cannot expect one in the short term, because it is a big job. However, the former minister and the new minister have promised that consultations are going to be held. Nothing has changed at the moment. We would very much like to hold consultations and to find a little more, shall we say, commercial way of going about it, that is to say a way to better tie the cost of the licence to the value of the product, but we have not started that yet.
Bloc
Meili Faille Bloc Vaudreuil—Soulanges, QC
Is that because it is not one of your priorities? What is preventing you from doing it?
Deputy Minister, Department of Fisheries and Oceans
No, it is very important and it represents a major priority for us, but it is very complicated. The minister has asked us to do it and we intend to do so very soon.
Bloc
Meili Faille Bloc Vaudreuil—Soulanges, QC
She has asked you to do it, but can you be more precise? I am being stubborn about this because the stakes are high. It is very important for the fisherman.They want the price to be adjusted as quickly as possible. We have to come to grips with this file. Can you give us an idea of your timeline?
Deputy Minister, Department of Fisheries and Oceans
It is not an easy job. I do not want to give you the wrong idea.
Meili Faille Bloc Vaudreuil—Soulanges, QC
You do not want to be pestered. If you say that it will be done by June, we could pester you about it then.
Deputy Minister, Department of Fisheries and Oceans
Certainly, it is a job that we would like to do, but it is impossible to do by June, because then, everyone in the department is working on the fisheries. Fisheries are starting everywhere, and the fishermen would not appreciate being invited to consultations while they are out fishing.
We could start the job this summer or at least have discussions with some people. We could start it, but we would not finish it this summer. The job will take some time.
NDP
Peter Stoffer NDP Sackville—Eastern Shore, NS
Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Thank you, ladies and gentlemen, for appearing today.
I always sit back and reflect a bit on the fact that it's ironic that MPs, with their budgets and salaries, are questioning the people who serve us--their budgets, and so on. I always figure the best people for that should be that single mom working at Tim Hortons or that family with an autistic child. They should question our budgets and whether or not the taxpayer got value for it.
Madam Ridgeway, I know your history is impeccable. You have an incredible pedigree, as I know my colleague and friend Geoff Regan, the former minister, would say. You should be congratulated on the outstanding work you have done.
You can help me figure this out. We have a fisheries ambassador. I assumed, especially when he was first appointed, that he was supposed to do a lot of this international work, going around and protecting Canada's interests. Then we have Madam Ridgeway apparently doing the same thing. It always makes me think about what these two people are doing. Do they ever talk to each other? Do they work together? Is there a need for a fisheries ambassador?
There was one prior to 1995, I believe, and then the position was taken away and then brought back in 2006 under Mr. Hearn, I believe. My first question is on the comparison of the two. In this time of restraint, do we have to have the two?
The second question is this. You talked about the UN and the high seas dragging issue. I remember it quite well. Some of my facts may be a bit off, but Greenpeace had started the petition--and I believe Mr. Bevan is aware of it--of trying to get high seas dragging off the unregulated areas of the high seas.
I believe, David, if I'm right, that 30% or 35% of the seas are regulated, like NAFO on that, and 65% are unregulated. I could be wrong on that.
David Bevan Assistant Deputy Minister, Fisheries and Aquaculture Management, Department of Fisheries and Oceans
This move afoot is part of the work that Ms. Ridgeway was doing to lay the groundwork. We now are looking at covering virtually the entire northern hemisphere, at least, with RFMOs that will deal with this. So in the North Atlantic, we have NAFO in the west and NEAF, the Northeast Atlantic Fisheries Organization, in the east. In the North Pacific the anadromous-fished salmons are all covered, the tuna are all covered, and now there's a new RFMO being negotiated that will deal with all the rest of the North Pacific.
Much of the world is covered. I'd say most of the major fisheries are now covered by a regional fish management organization.
Assistant Deputy Minister, Fisheries and Aquaculture Management, Department of Fisheries and Oceans
A very small amount right now. I'd have to get back to you with a percentage on that.
NDP
Peter Stoffer NDP Sackville—Eastern Shore, NS
Okay, that would be great.
If I wasn't mistaken, the motion before the UN was just to stop high seas dragging on the unregulated areas of the seas. Am I correct?
Assistant Deputy Minister, Fisheries and Aquaculture Management, Department of Fisheries and Oceans
I think you're perhaps better situated to answer that.
Deputy Minister, Department of Fisheries and Oceans
We'll start with your first question and then we'll go to that one.
The first question is, do we need two people?
I'd say we need many more than two. In fact, I don't want to lead the committee to believe, Mr. Chair, that there are only two. I travel internationally and Mr. Bevan does. Mr. Bevan has a whole other team led by Monsieur Beaupré. In fact, there's a simple division in my mind, because I'm new to this job. Where we are trading in actual fish, it would be Mr. Bevan's job, and where we are working with international policy and governance issues, it would be Mr. Beaupré's shop.
The ambassador functions in a completely different sphere because he, being a formal ambassador, gets to interact with ambassadors from other countries. Certainly in Europe and all over the world there are many levels that we need to be working at. Sometimes it's at the ministerial level and sometimes it's at the technical level.
NDP
Peter Stoffer NDP Sackville—Eastern Shore, NS
Perhaps I could stop you for one second. Don't we have high commissioners and ambassadors who do that already?
Deputy Minister, Department of Fisheries and Oceans
They have many, many files that they work on. Having somebody dedicated specifically to our issues has been very helpful in the seal file, I can say.
In terms of your specific question on the bottom trawling....
Director General, International Policy and Integration, Department of Fisheries and Oceans
Thank you.
Probably it links back to the question I was asked earlier; if there was something I was particularly proud to take part in, that was it.
The difficulty in that issue was understanding the process. This was a debate that was taking place in public, which very much understood--and we all shared the goals--what was happening, but didn't understand the process. The process was that there was no resolution before the UN until we just negotiated one. There was only a desire for one. That didn't stop anybody from saying there was one, but there wasn't one.
What we did in the UN was come together to negotiate the resolution that everybody was talking about that didn't yet exist. The first question was, how were we going to do that? We knew the international community was completely divided. That was something that was not out there. We were being presented as if we were the extreme, but we were actually dead in the middle. We had countries that were dedicated on the two extremes of that question.
The second issue we had was that it's only a few paragraphs in a bigger resolution. There's only one resolution: it's a resolution on sustainable fisheries. That year we had had the review of the UN Fish Stocks Agreement, and we had pages of recommendations that we wanted in that resolution, which was usually adopted by consensus and which would then bind everybody morally to those outcomes.
What we were going to have was no resolution because we couldn't agree on those paragraphs, and if those paragraphs are not agreed to, there is no resolution at all. If someone votes against the resolution, they're not bound by anything in it, and that would have been a very bad outcome. But two things were not understood: one, there wasn't anything in front of the UN until they negotiated it, and second, we were dead in the middle. And we had a really strong interest in having that resolution adopted by consensus. Our challenge was to find a way to bring the ends to the middle.
One of the things that I thank David Bevan for was he asked me to come to NAFO and become familiar with it and how it worked, and also to start to get a bit of a feel for how we want to protect sea mammals, so that I understood the thinking about what would be the best kind of solution to get both conservation and sustainable use so I could take that and turn it into a model we could get people to rally behind.
To close off—I don't want to take up all your time—what I had said to the environmental community is that it's better to have a regime shift and management that we're accountable to than have a declaration in a resolution that is not binding or practical. There was no way under international law to actually manage a ban on the high seas. The only thing that would have happened was that markets were waiting for the UN to declare against bottom trawling. They would have shut markets against all bottom-trawled product, and it would not have been contained to the unregulated high seas.
As Canadians who believe in good sustainability but also sustainable use, we wanted a very practical regime shift that we could hold RFMOs and states accountable to, that would bring people to the middle, and that would be fundamentally different. It would be new and very important, and it would save the resolution. And that's what we did.
It took a tremendous amount of time. I was completely misunderstood in the public debate, but that was what happened there.
