Fisheries Committee on Oct. 27th, 2009

[The Chair, Conservative, Rodney Weston]

Thank you very much.

Monsieur Blais.

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

Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

Good afternoon. Given what I have heard up until now and what I have seen in the documents, you have already studied the benefits and the consequences of a fisheries treaty like NAFO. Considering your concern with the conservation of species in general, I imagine that you have also already studied the most fundamental points of the NAFO treaty that should be kept or improved.

Could you tell us a bit more about that?

[Dr. Boris Worm]

I apologize, I'm not an expert on the NAFO framework. I can only speak from my experience of talking to scientists who are concerned about these stocks. They feel that in the past the management of stocks under NAFO has not been very effective in reducing illegal and unregulated fishing and setting precautionary quotas that allow for rebuilding.

The main point I want to make to this committee is that we need a change in vision from managing for exploitation to managing for rebuilding. My understanding is that shift in mindset and goals has not occurred within NAFO as yet. At least it's not evidenced by anything they have done.

I don't think I'm qualified to comment on how the framework is structured, what parts to keep, and what parts to change. I apologize.

[Dr. Heike Lotze]

I don't know much about the NAFO either. But one international agreement that did work in the past was the International Whaling Commission. There was an international body that decided they wanted to stop these species from declining further. They wanted to protect whales; they wanted them to come back. And it worked.

I think these international agreements can work.

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

More generally, we are discussing NAFO, conservation of the resource, and human beings as harvesters who go out in boats and take in that resource. We are also talking about species that amongst themselves have an impact on resources. I will not get into the story of seals eating the cod; I will not launch into that debate.

Climate change is an issue that greatly concerns me. I understand that there is no sufficiently exhaustive study that can inform us of the impacts of climate change. Could you talk to me a bit more about that?

[Dr. Boris Worm]

That's a very important topic that the science community is actively studying. I'll give you an example. North Sea cod is a resource that historically has been incredibly important for the region. It has been systematically overfished in large part because it straddles various countries' EEZs, so it's hard to get any one country to commit to reducing catches. I understand that most recently that has been alleviated a little bit.

So that stock is at low biomass. Superimposed on that, what is happening is that as the waters in the North Sea have warmed over the last 20 years, some of the food items that cod depend on--so it is not predators--have shifted north towards Iceland, where there's different cod. The North Sea cod has not been able to keep up with those changes. It's well documented that those changes in the ecosystem, a move towards smaller prey species, has impacted the survival of juvenile cod. So they're in a double jeopardy. They are at low biomass and they have increased mortality of juveniles and less survival, which means they will decline further.

This would not be a problem with a much larger stock that produces a larger year-class. If it had some additional mortality through climate change, that wouldn't be a problem. With a very small stock, it becomes a big problem. That's why, for example, Keith Brander, who works for ICES, has published a high-profile paper in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences about climate change in fisheries. He says the one thing we can do to brace fish stocks against collapse or further damage from climate change is to rebuild them to above the biomass that would allow for maximum yield. That is exactly the point we're making here. We're saying you have to do it because it makes economic sense and because it provides increased stability for resource users. He says that you also need to do it to brace stocks against increased environmental variability. That's almost invariably true in the literature when people have studied the fluctuations of these stocks.

So stocks respond to climate, and in many cases there are increasing problems through warming waters, but we can help them recover by increasing their biomass through a rebuilding strategy. That's the one thing we can do.

[The Chair, Conservative, Rodney Weston]

Thank you very much.

Mr. Stoffer.

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

Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

And thank you both for coming today.

One of the reasons I asked you to appear before the committee is because we had Dr. William Brodie, the senior science coordinator and advisor for the Northwest Atlantic Fisheries Organization, appear before our committee. Obviously, quotas negotiated by NAFO countries are based, I assume, on scientific advice.

Dr. Lotze, you indicated that we have a lack of knowledge or assessment on the invertebrate species. Does that comment refer to strictly to within Canada, or internationally? Because the evidence we were given.... He says here: “The scientific council provides advice to the fisheries commission on 18 stocks of fish and invertebrate species.” So this is information that is provided to the commission. You've indicated that we don't have enough information on invertebrate species, yet the scientific council is providing advice to the fisheries commission on these species.

So is it possible that the scientific council is providing advice to the commission, thus to the countries that are exploiting these resources, based on information that is not complete? My concern is that if you're exploiting a species of fish, either inside or outside the 200-mile limit, if you don't have the comprehensive scientific knowledge, is it possible you're fishing a stock in a method that could be quite dangerous to that particular stock?

[Dr. Heike Lotze]

You're very right on that. There are a number of invertebrate fisheries that have been around for a while. Lobster is one fishery, but there are others that have been newly developed as a response to declining traditional groundfish fisheries mostly. So these are things like sea cucumbers, sea urchins, snow crabs, rock crabs, other crabs. Hagfish is another species that has been newly developed. Those mainly started in the eighties. For a number of these fisheries, I have a student who looked into seven stocks that have only 20% of the population knowledge factors that you need to do a proper scientific stock assessment, which we do for most finfish species. There is some knowledge on the fishery and how much is caught, but the basic biomass, like how much is out there, where are these species, how do they respond to exploitation, is often lacking.

I just compared the research documents on the sea cucumber fisheries for the west coast and the east coast, and they have both been around for roughly ten years. The west coast has 160 pages, very detailed, good knowledge, a good assessment. The east coast has 30 pages, but it reads mostly as we don't know this, we don't know this, we don't know this. So it's very risky.

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

Is it fair to say that the international scientific council, which is all part of NAFO, could be exploiting species within the NAFO-regulated areas that they don't have all the complete scientific knowledge on? Is that possible?

[Dr. Heike Lotze]

That's possible, yes. Like the sea cucumber fisheries around the world, there is not much assessment, and it's rapid boom-and-bust fisheries globally.

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

Dr. Worm, as you may recall, the 3M cod stocks were recently reopened. I think the area was closed for fishing cod stocks for well over ten years. Scientists have indicated that the biomass has been increasing. In my previous committee I said three to five million tonnes, but I was wrong on that. The exploitation rate through science, the TAC, the total allowable catch, was anywhere from 3,000 tonnes to 12,000 tonnes. They settled on a figure of around 5,500 tonnes. I asked the scientist, if you're using what is called a precautionary principle in a rebuilding stock that's coming back, wouldn't you have taken the lowest amount of the TAC in order to protect the stock? He indicated that's within scientific advice, and that it's also economical and also possible that this stock can still rebuild, even with a higher TAC. Is this something you would agree with? Am I just being overly cautious here when I hear the term “precautionary principle” in this regard when it comes to the international stocks?

[Dr. Boris Worm]

I will not give my opinion, but I will give what's done in the U.S., which I think makes a lot of sense. When a stock is rebuilding and there's uncertainty as to where the stock is, as there always is, and there's uncertainty as to how much we should take, as there always is—there's a range, and 3,000 to 12,000 is a large range, which tells me as a scientist that there's a lot of uncertainty—they always go with the lower band by law. This is because the lower band provides a buffer against uncertainty, particularly for rebuilding stock. Rebuilding stock is a patient who is healing, and you want to put as little pressure as humanly possible in order to come back as quickly as possible to a biomass where it can be fully exploited again. I would agree, based on the U.S. position on this, and the U.S. existing law and practice, that it's a good idea to go with the lower band for rebuilding stocks.

Again, this is actually something that will come up in Canada very soon, because the northern cod stock in Newfoundland is starting to rebuild, after almost 20 years of doing almost nothing. We see an increase from 1% to 2% in the biomass, so the question is, do we start to fish again? I brought this up with the minister this morning, and she said “No, we won't”. I hope she will stick with that, because there will be tremendous pressure to take whatever is produced as surplus every year and have it exploited directly. That's a very bad short-term strategy. The appropriate long-term strategy is to have it rebuild to the biomass that provides maximum yield, or an additional buffer against climate, above that, and then proceed. I hope that's being done.

But it will be politically very contentious. I think it's something that needs to be on the radar, that as these stocks rebuild, it's a good-news story but it doesn't mean we can go back to fishing them full-scale again. I've seen the increases in the 3M cod in the assessment, and it looks very good, I agree. It makes me happy, because it's a success story, but it doesn't mean that we should go ahead and fish it full-scale.

[The Chair, Conservative, Rodney Weston]

Thank you, Dr. Worm.

Mr. Calkins.

[Blaine Calkins, Conservative, Wetaskiwin, AB]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Thank you for coming here today. This is very interesting to me, and the reason it's interesting is that I have a zoology degree in fisheries and aquatic sciences from the University of Alberta and I worked for a number of years as a fisheries technician for Alberta Fish and Wildlife. I was a technician working on a walleye experiment—my experience is strictly freshwater—but the underlying principles I think are still the same.

I've also had the privilege of serving my country as a conservation officer and as a national park warden, and I'm going to talk a little bit about that, because I've gone through some of the information that has been made available to me, and the one argument that I think is always missing from organizations that want to protect or promote marine ecosystems is the economic argument. They make an excellent case from the scientific perspective, they make a good case from a public policy perspective, but they don't make a very good case from the economic perspective. You've touched on that and said that if we changed our focus, managing in a different way from the traditional focus on exploitation, managing for rebuilding would provide those economic benefits. I'd like to talk about that.

I'll give you an example from when I was a national park warden. A national park is a refuge. It is a completely different underlying principle from a conservation model; it is a preservation model. In a national park, you would have herds of, say, bighorn sheep. That's what I dealt with in the back country. I was charged with the task of guarding the boundary, making sure that hunters, poachers, or whoever would not come into the park. At the same time, I was working in a constructive manner to do the counts and all those things to make sure that the wildlife are there.

I got to know the guides and the outfitters in the area who would charge their guests up to $30,000 each for the privilege of hunting a bighorn sheep. The best place to hunt a bighorn sheep in Alberta is right on the edge of a national park boundary, because that's the area of refuge. The bighorn sheep are not stupid; they figure that out. Because those populations are there and will eventually cross that boundary, it creates economic benefit for the area and the region; it's quite effective.

That's not going to work for all stocks. It's not going to work for pelagics; it's not going to work for stocks that migrate; it's not going to work for the diadema stocks. But it will work for groundfish and certain other stocks.

So I'm asking you, from your perspective, where it would fit in. You talked about catch shares as one of your new solutions, and about communal eco-management and fishery certification, but you didn't really talk about the perspective of protecting the bigger ecosystem. Where would that fall among the new solutions?

[Dr. Boris Worm]

There are certain measures that increase the availability of the resource, such as the rebuilding strategies I've talked about; then there are other measures that mesh with them that protect biodiversity and protect the larger ecosystems. Enclosed areas like national parks are part of that strategy.

Another strategy I mentioned that would protect biodiversity is changes to fishing gear to make it less destructive. For example, on Georges Bank, due to the U.S. law there was a restriction on fishing haddock—which is rebuilding, as I said—because there was a bycatch of cod. So there was incentive for fishermen, in order to not be shut down because of the bycatch issue, to change their gear in a way that would avoid bycatch. This they did with a separator panel that basically chucks out all the cod and other things and provides almost pure haddock catch. That's a simple technological solution to a problem that has been lingering for a while, but there had been no incentive to solve it, because there was no clear, hard and fast rule to rebuild cod and haddock at the same time, as there is now.

I want to give you an example of benefits flowing to fishing communities. I think it's a striking one. This concerns the lobster fishery in New Zealand, which in a particular part of New Zealand was depleted, and the stock was in trouble. The scientific advice was to reduce the quota and let the stock rebuild to safe levels again. Fishermen were opposed to that because they didn't see the benefits of it flowing to them. Their thinking was, in five years I may not be in the fishery any more; somebody else will reap the benefit. They transformed that to a catch share system, whereby every fisherman got a particular share of the catch guaranteed. That catch share was tradeable, and at that point the market valued it at $50,000 per tonne—which is not a lot, in the big scheme of things—because the fishery was so depleted that it wasn't worth much.

Under that regime, they actually pushed for a reduction to the total allowable catch, which led to a rebuilding of the resource. Only three years later, their share had increased from $50,000 to $250,000 on the market, which means their asset had increased fivefold because of proper management. That set up a cascade of similar measures around New Zealand, because people were seeing that it makes economic sense to rebuild, if you are guaranteed to reap the benefits through, for example, a catch share system. This doesn't have to be an individual catch share; it could also be a cooperative or community catch share.

That's what has been working there. Those are economic benefits realized in a very quick time. To have in just three years a fivefold increase in the value of your share is an enormous return on the “investment”, if you will. That's one example.

Often, these measures, as in the Georges Bank example—the closed areas put in to protect haddock and other stocks—come with biodiversity benefits; for example, scallops, flounder, even sharks rebuilding under that scenario.

[Blaine Calkins, Conservative, Wetaskiwin, AB]

Would it be fair to say, then, that if we were able to get an agreement that includes the national area.... You've made the case that the 200-mile exclusive economic zone is a clearer case for an argument about better fish stock management than the regional management agreements we're currently debating in this committee. But if we were to move, at these regional meeting levels, in the direction you're talking about, you're asserting in front of the committee today that this will improve fish stocks.

It's not just about the management. Obviously there's enforcement; there are all kinds of issues. If you take a look at the case of the Patagonian toothfish—I don't know whether you've ever read the book Hooked—it's an absolute nightmare. The whole story about trying to catch just one person who was allegedly illegally fishing was a complete disaster. There's more to the story than just the management side of things.

[Dr. Boris Worm]

Enforcement is important, but monitoring is as well.

[Blaine Calkins, Conservative, Wetaskiwin, AB]

Monitoring is as well.

In the NAFO agreement right now, the way it was worded is that the people who monitor on the ship are from the same country the ship is from, which is a bone of contention for me. It seems like a complete conflict of interest. But I understand that the current agreement is the best we could get at the time.

Through the discussions you've had within the scientific community, obviously with the professionals that you would have associations and relations with, has anybody offered you their advice about whether Canada should ratify the new amendments to the NAFO convention?

[Dr. Boris Worm]

No.

[Blaine Calkins, Conservative, Wetaskiwin, AB]

Is it that those aren't typical discussions that you would have, or that nobody has recommended it?

[Dr. Boris Worm]

I haven't had such discussions recently.

My sense from the scientific community is that there was a great deal of frustration with the ineffectiveness of NAFO and other RFMOs, such as ICAP, for example. People felt it was more worthwhile to invest their time in coastal state management, with the 200-mile limit, because that's the way you can produce results, and there was a disillusionment or frustration with the way NAFO has worked in the past.

That's the sense I have gotten almost uniformly from those involved.

[Blaine Calkins, Conservative, Wetaskiwin, AB]

Okay.

[The Chair, Conservative, Rodney Weston]

Thank you very much, Mr. Calkins.

Thank you, Dr. Worm and Dr. Lotze.

I want to take this opportunity to once again thank you for coming to meet with our committee today and for presenting your point of view. We appreciate your efforts to get here.

[Dr. Boris Worm]

Thank you for the insightful questions and the discussion. It was very helpful.