Thank you, Mr. Chair and committee, for the opportunity to present the concerns of the local fishing community.
My name really is John, but everybody calls me Jake. At present I'm the hatchery manager for the Bluewater Anglers fish culture station, which is located in Point Edward. It's part of Sarnia in Lambton County. I've been on the board of directors for the last 12 years and have been president for some time.
I also serve on the MNR's Lake Huron FMZ 13 advisory committee, so most of my comments apply to Lake Huron. That's the lake I know best. That's home.
I'm a non-professional and a dedicated fisherman.
I'll tell you a little bit about our club history and operation.
Back in 1980 a group of local sport fishermen decided they wanted to put something back into their sport. We have a current membership of 400. The initial emphasis by the club was to raise rainbow trout to enhance the local sport-fishing effort. In 1984 the Ontario Ministry of Natural Resources sanctioned the stocking of chinook salmon. The club lobbied and was granted a licence to raise and stock chinooks. The club then proceeded to fund and build a full-scale, 5,000-square-foot hatchery. This was accomplished in two years. The first fish were stocked in 1986. Since inception, this hatchery has raised and stocked over five million fish, all to Lake Huron.
Along with fish stocking, the club is active in a variety of community activities to encourage youth involvement, public education, and community tourism. Our greatest support is from our host community, the village of Point Edward.
The majority of our finding is raised by the membership. We receive $3,000 a year: $1,000 for each species we raise. This comes from hunting and fishing licences. It's exactly the same amount of money we received in 1982. My travel expenses today will be almost equal to any funding we receive from governments. All additional funding to operate and maintain the hatchery is raised by the membership.
As fishermen, today we feel threatened, not so much in a physical sense, but in regard to the effects the invasives have had and are having on the local fisheries, and the potential total disruption of the enjoyment of the lake as we know it if the Asian carp ever arrives. Chicago is a lot closer to Sarnia than it is to Ottawa.
Over time, we have seen the devastating changes to our fishery—some good, some bad. One of the first noticeable impacts was the lamprey wounding to all of the game fish in the area. We see the wounding numbers at our annual salmon derby, where data is collected every year. It's cyclical, but it's always there—and I don't like lampreys in my boat.
The alewife is an invasive that made its way into the Great Lakes with the opening of the Welland Canal. In the 1960s it was a major problem on the lakes, with large masses of rotting carcasses on the beaches. Fortunately, the control—another exotic species, the chinook salmon—became an industry of its own, providing commercial enterprise and an exciting new sport-fishing industry.
By the mid-eighties the zebra mussel arrived in our area. Initially it was thought to be not so much a problem for the fisheries but more for the physical structures of the area—water lines and docks. This was not the case. It soon became evident that the mussel was depriving the bottom end of the food chain, filtering the planktons out of the water. In the early 2000s the salmon fishery started to weaken; the forage base was shrinking. By 2003 we were seeing a fish we called “swimming heads”—a 10-pound salmon in a 25-pound body. They were not getting enough forage to sustain their numbers.
Today the alewife has totally disappeared from the lower end of the lake because it was competing for the same food source as the zebra muscle and the round goby, another exotic. It was very weak going into the extremely cold winter of 2002-2003 and this year-class hatch was totally wiped out because of its weakness. It has not recovered in the lower end of the lake, and I fear we have not seen the full effect of the zebra mussel. The water in Lake Huron is too clear. When light can penetrate to depths of 50 feet, we're going to start growing things that we really don't want to ever see.
The financial effect of this is easier to see on the U.S. side of the lake, where every port had numerous charter boat operators. They had to employ security people just to control the salmon fishermen on the weekends at the boat launches. It was that attractive a sport. Along with the charter operators, the restaurants and tackle shops are gone. One report I read estimated a $1 million loss to these small villages. The charter boats have either moved to Lake Michigan or Lake Ontario or totally shut down. At one time there were four operating out of the marinas in Sarnia. There is now one part-time between Sarnia and Grand Bend.
We've seen improvements in the salmon fishery, but we don't see the size of fish or the numbers of fish. Small food means small fish. The fish in most cases are into a three-year cycle now instead of a natural four-year spawning cycle, which gives us problems in the hatchery. We see small eggs, underdevelopment, and higher losses.
If the Asian carp gets established in our ecosystem, it will be a major competitor for the total fishery. Once again, it will be a competitor for the lower end of the food web. For the existing fish community, it's like trying to climb a ladder up the side of a building with the bottom two or three steps missing: there's nothing for the fish to get started on.
From the U.S. studies, we see that any motorized activity on the lake could create a severe hazard if the silver carp ever start to jump. If, as has happened on the lower Mississippi, 90% of the habitat is taken over by the carp, there will be no sport fishery as we know it today, and I would guess our commercial fisheries would become unproductive or totally obsolete.
Can we afford to take a several-billion-dollar hit to our Great Lakes fisheries?
We also now have the quagga mussel competing for the same territory as the zebra mussel. It goes deeper and is slightly larger. It is similar to the zebra mussel, and all of these affect the food chain.
The following are recommendations from the local fish community:
Sea lamprey control needs to be increased; $8 million is a small number for all the Great Lakes. DFO funding for this has not changed since 2004. Fish-wounding rates are up, which we as fishermen can see. Control measures need to be intensified.
Close the Chicago shipping and sanitation channel. Stop the fish before they get here.
Increase enforcement on fish transport. Only allow the transport of gutted fish. If they're dead, they won't swim.
With respect to transshipping, stop the ocean freighters at the east and west coast ports. Stop bringing things into our Great Lakes. The lost dollars add up to a very large number compared to the small economic benefit of having ocean boats on the lakes. Somewhere there is a report that ocean boats generate something like $50 million a year to our economy. Zebra mussel control is something in the order of $700 million a year. Those are phenomenal numbers.
In terms of education, don't dispose of any live fish into waters the fish are not native to, not even into the toilet. The Ministry of Natural Resources had an experiment years ago in Thunder Bay that introduced pink salmon into the lake. The sewage treatment plant did not kill those fish, where they thought it would.
Thank you for this opportunity.