Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
I manage a wild fishery. We have a lot of regulations, and they're there for good reason. The regulations are there to ensure the health of the stock and to ensure that we don't take more than what the stock can sustain. We're trying to develop these fisheries for the economic benefit of Canadians. This is a public fishery. As a former member of this place, a former chairman of this committee, and now as someone who works in the industry, I don't think my view is biased. I read everything I can, but I can tell you that the way the department has handled the wild fishery and the way they have handled the aquaculture industry are completely different.
I don't know if you heard from Alexandra Morton when she was here, because I didn't have the chance to read her testimony, but last year I took her to Ottawa. We visited the minister and a lot of people who are at this table. She was seeking the federal government's action to do something as this tragedy unfolded.
What really struck me was how one department can be so inconsistent in the application of the law. We can't go out on a vessel and turn our lights on. It's called pit-lamping. You can't do that at night because it attracts all the food. It attracts the fish. Everything in the water is attracted to the lights.
These fish farms have lights on in the pens all night. They're there to try to force growth, or whatever the biology is, but they are attracting wild fish, both as feed and to find feed. They're attracting them into the pens where there is a hyperabundance of sea lice and disease, if there is any.
We can't do it, so when we came to Ottawa, we asked the department to invoke the regulations in the same way they do with the wild fishery. We also said that dockside monitoring was needed. We have to count and measure every single fish, but there isn't the same dockside monitoring for the aquaculture industry. It's illegal for you to catch a sablefish and sell it unless you have a licence, but we know from individuals who have worked in the aquaculture sector that other species are landed when they fish out their farmed salmon, but they are not accounted for. If you did it, Mr. Chairman, you would face a charge under the Fisheries Act, but it seems that when it's over on the aquaculture side, the farmed side, they get away without anything happening.
As somebody who believes in ecosystem-based management and looks after an association that puts a million dollars a year into science, it is aggravating as hell to see that another part of our industry does not operate under the same terms and conditions. It's one of the fundamental things that hopefully your committee will be able to get to.
The other thing deals with the judgment from September last year that the 1988 agreement transferring responsibility for licensing for aquaculture to the province was indeed unconstitutional. Here's my concern. If anybody is going to regulate aquaculture, I want it to be the federal government. I've made that clear from the get-go, because the provincial government had no responsibility for wild stocks. The only responsibility they had until that judgment was for aquaculture.
I know of many instances, some of which I've raised directly with the provincial minister, in which there was a conflict. Clearly they would always go where their jurisdiction was, and that was to protect aquaculture and not the wild stock. The federal minister has a fiduciary responsibility to protect the public fishery, to protect that wild stock; if there is an inconsistency in demand or application, I want to make sure that somebody who's accountable to Parliament will be looking after their responsibilities in managing these wild stocks.
My concern is that it's been over a year since that ruling. The decision is under appeal, but what's under appeal isn't whether or not the jurisdictional decision was right--nobody's appealing that--it's who owns the fish in the pens. Is this a wild fish? Does it belong to the farms?
The fundamental problem I have with this issue raging in British Columbia, and potentially coming to a pen with sablefish in it pretty soon, is that nobody in my sector has been consulted. The department is out there putting together new rules to take over aquaculture, which I think is appropriate, but there has been no consultation. To have bad rules and regulations for the feds to take over will just make the situation worse.
I hope this committee will see that as an oversight and that it can deal with the department as these rules are developed, so that all stakeholders, be they farmers or be they recreational or commercial fishermen, would have some input through the committee.