Fisheries Committee on March 5th, 2013

[Keith Ashfield, Conservative, Fredericton, NB]

Thank you. The Fisheries Act will continue to be enforced by fisheries officers, both federal and provincial, across the country. There are numerous ways that can be done. I'll ask the staff to talk about the specifics of the consolidations if we can. Trevor is going to talk about those.

[Trevor Swerdfager]

Thank you, Minister.

The work that the department is engaged in is restructuring the organization previously known as Habitat. It will now be known as the fisheries protection program, as you have indicated.

We are going to go from a highly distributed footprint under which we had approximately 68 habitat offices, many of which had one or two people in them, down to 15 offices. They will be consolidated in all of the major capitals, if you will, in centres across the country. In so doing we will allow ourselves to more effectively concentrate our resources, establish stronger management controls, and ensure greater consistency and coherence across the program to ensure that the work of the program is directly focused on the protection of commercial, recreational, and aboriginal fisheries and their habitat.

The organization is being restructured into a series of what we call fisheries protection units. We are grouping experts along the lines of development-type projects. For example, we will have a group on oil, mining, and gas, and those sorts of things. I won't describe the entire org chart because time doesn't allow that, but essentially the focus is on creating a triage unit, into which project proposals would come. They would be directed into a particular fisheries protection unit for assessment and moved forward.

The bottom line from our perspective is that it's not a little tweak, it's not a touch on a lever or a dial, but a restructuring of the program to align the delivery with the new provisions of the act.

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

Thank you.

I want to ask the minister a bit about the Cohen commission. Can you just tell us what engagement has been taking place as we move toward this new fisheries protection program?

[Trevor Swerdfager]

Thank you, Mr. Kamp.

As the provisions were being developed, prior to Christmas primarily, we engaged in a number of bilateral conversations with industry groups, several environmental groups across the country, several first nation organizations, including land claimants, and so on.

Our intent going forward over the course of the next several months is to again conduct a series of engagement sessions with major sectors, if you will. We don't foresee having a large mass of workshop gatherings where we would bring everybody to Ottawa—much as I know people from around the country want to come here. It would be a case of our working with communities and sectors engaged in fish habitat protection in a series of bilateral discussions over the course of the next three or four months.

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

Thank you very much.

Minister, as you know, the final report of the Cohen commission was tabled in the House of Commons on October of last year after almost three years and $26 million. Can you summarize for us what you and your officials have been doing with the report since then and if and when there might be a government response?

[Keith Ashfield, Conservative, Fredericton, NB]

Thank you again, Mr. Kamp.

Of course, as you indicated, the Cohen report was around a three-year exercise and it cost several millions of dollars. It's an important report and we thank Justice Cohen and his team for the hard work they did in compiling the information and the many hundreds of hours of testimony they received.

Of course, we established the Cohen commission in 2009 to get a better idea of what was happening to the decreasing salmon stocks in British Columbia. I think there are about 75 recommendations that were targeted toward DFO in that report. We will be working with stakeholders and partners, and we are currently reviewing Justice Cohen's findings and his recommendations very carefully. A lot of what he is recommending we currently do in many ways, and moneys that we will be directing over the course of the next few years will address some of those issues as well.

[The Chair, Conservative, Rodney Weston]

Thank you very much.

Mr. Chisholm.

[Robert Chisholm, NDP, Dartmouth—Cole Harbour, NS]

Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman.

And, Minister, it's good to see you. Thank you and your officials for taking time to come and see us.

Let me say at the beginning that it's an extremely important process for us as parliamentarians to look at the mains and supplementary estimates. Of course, given the fact that the report on plans and priorities hasn't come down yet, it makes it difficult for us to analyze these documents without knowing what your department or the government's priorities are. We have until the end of May. I'm hoping that you and your officials will be agreeable to coming back once that report has been tabled, so we can address further questions to you.

I also want move a little bit to the whole second phase of the process of implementing the major changes presented in Bill C-38. Minister, you said at the end of the spring that there would be full, open, and transparent public consultations on the changes prescribed in that legislation. They are very significant as they relate to habitat management.

I know there was an internal deadline of January 1, but I understand that it may now be April 2. In that respect I'd like to ask you a couple of specific questions.

Could you provide us with information on when and with whom consultation meetings were held on these specific provisions, whether with stakeholders or first nations, and the nature of those discussions.

In addition would you give us an indication of what your department's schedule is for engaging in further public consultation prior to the amendments you committed to hearing when Bill C-38 was being debated.

[Keith Ashfield, Conservative, Fredericton, NB]

Of course, we went through a lot of consultation prior to that. I'm not sure if we provided a list to the committee of some of our earlier consultations. I believe we did—

[Matthew King]

In December.

[Keith Ashfield, Conservative, Fredericton, NB]

—in December, is my understanding. And we continue to consult with various stakeholders and conservation groups to further this process.

As far as the exact timelines go, we would be happy to provide an additional list of people whom we have consulted with since December. We can do that. That's not a problem, Mr. Chisholm.

As far as the exact timelines are concerned, do we have the exact timelines for further consultations, deputy?

[Matthew King]

We have been consulting non-stop since we tabled the list with the committee in November. As the minister said, we'd be happy to give you that. I think we could go further and lay out a prospective consultation schedule that would take us until, say, the end of the session, just to give the committee the full sense of where we're going on this.

That third part of the schedule is always a little tentative. Sometimes these are very difficult to set up, but I think we could give you what we have.

[Robert Chisholm, NDP, Dartmouth—Cole Harbour, NS]

Thank you. I would appreciate that—and as I also asked, a bit of information on the nature of those consultations, because one person's consultation sometimes is another person's happenstance meeting in a mall. So we want to get that too.

I have one other quick question, and then I'm going to share the rest of my time with Mr. Toone. I understand that a new habitat policy is being brought down sometime this month. If so would you confirm that, and if not when can we expect to see a new policy presented in this regard?

[Keith Ashfield, Conservative, Fredericton, NB]

I know we are currently working on a new habitat policy. With regard to the timelines, we could ask Mr. Swerdfager if he has the timelines for that.

[Trevor Swerdfager]

There's no policy coming out in April, as the minister has just said. As we engage with Canadians across the country over the next six or eight months and regulations come forward, one of the things the department will be doing is considering what changes to the existing policy base are required. We don't have a detailed plan as to when a new policy will come out and what it will look like.

The work under way right now to get ready for the coming into force focus is to provide guidance to staff on getting up and running in the initial instance. The department has also devoted some attention to the development of a regulation that would lay out requirements for information from a proponent and the timelines in which the department would make decisions. That regulation has not yet been presented for consideration. I can't tell you the timeline of when it will come out. The department has done some preliminary analysis on that, but it's not the department's call as to precisely when that would come out in the regulatory process as a regulation as opposed to an overall policy.

[Robert Chisholm, NDP, Dartmouth—Cole Harbour, NS]

Thank you.

[The Chair, Conservative, Rodney Weston]

Mr. Toone.

[Philip Toone, NDP, Gaspésie—Îles-de-la-Madeleine, QC]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Thank you for being here, Mr. Minister.

Last month, in the House, you said that there had been no change in the department's publishing policy. However, we later learned about a brief indicating that a new policy has been in effect since February 2013. An American scientist even said that it was similar to a muzzling exercise of scientists and that it was an affront to the freedom of expression of scientists.

Could you explain the change that came into effect and, in particular, how it could align with our policy for the Arctic.

[Keith Ashfield, Conservative, Fredericton, NB]

Thank you, Mr. Toone.

In fact, there have been no recent changes to DFO's publication policy and there are no plans to make substantive changes. The department has made procedural adjustments to ensure that the department is in compliance with copyright laws, and we're very happy to say that we've invested a lot of money in science and technology, and I'm very proud to promote the important work our scientists are doing. That's why we share research material and publish research findings. Our scientists provide thousands of interviews per year regarding their work and lecture at conferences all over the world.

So we will continue that process. We're not, in any sense, trying to stifle scientists. That's not the case at all. I think it's very obvious. We responded to over 1,500 science-based media inquiries between 2010 and now, and our scientists are publishing all the time. There have been 300 science reports documenting our research in Canada's fisheries and oceans, as an example.

In terms of the specific question and what brought the policy into question and the questions around that, I would defer to Mr. Stringer. He can provide the answer to that, based on policy work within the department.

[Kevin Stringer]

Thank you for the question.

As the minister said, there has been an approval process for scientific publications by the department for a long time, since the 1970s. The minister also said that there was a slight change in the procedures related to this process in one of our regions, because of a report by the auditor general.

I will continue in English.

The Auditor General's report in 2009 said that a number of departments, including the Department of Fisheries and Oceans, were not taking sufficient action to adequately protect intellectual property. So we looked at our procedures, and our procedures did not make it clear in this one region that the approval process applies both when our scientist is the primary or the sole author of a document and when our scientist is a secondary author. There may be intellectual property that we need to protect. The adjustment is to ensure that this is taking place.

So it is a small adjustment in the procedure. As the minister has said, the practice of approval—which takes place within the science sector, it should be noted—has been longstanding.

[The Chair, Conservative, Rodney Weston]

Thank you very much, Mr. Stringer.

Mr. Sopuck.

[Robert Sopuck, Conservative, Dauphin—Swan River—Marquette, MB]

Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

On the issue of consultation, Minister, I would just offer the suggestion that a year ago our government and the Prime Minister announced the creation of the Hunting and Angling Advisory Panel, of which every single major angling group in Canada is a member.

So this is probably a suggestion to Mr. Swerdfager, who is undertaking those consultations. You have a ready-made group already in place and I would strongly suggest that this be the consultative body from the recreational fishing community.

In terms of recreational fisheries versus commercial fisheries, I understand that the value of recreational fishing in Canada is about $8 billion a year, with about four million people participating, and the value of commercial fishing is in the $2-billion range. The departmental expenditures seem to be the exact opposite of those values.

Do you see a day, Minister, when the department will begin to place more emphasis on the recreational fishing industry/activity that is so critical to many areas, especially in rural Canada?

[Keith Ashfield, Conservative, Fredericton, NB]

You're absolutely correct about the recreational fishery and its importance to many Canadians, me included. I suggest there are probably others around the table who participate in the recreational fishery.

We're always cognizant of what we can do in the recreational fishery, a lot of which is provincial in nature. A lot of the work in that area is done by the provinces, but certainly we're happy to participate in it.

For example, for the halibut fishery in the recreational fishery on the west coast, we increased the percentage for that to 15%. It was well received by most, but by some it was not so well received. In any case, I think it was an important thing to do. It's one of the things that we have done to recognize the value of the recreational fishery to Canadians.

It is an incredible source of income for a lot of people as well. It has an economic side to it. There are social and economic sides to it that are important to Canadians.

[Robert Sopuck, Conservative, Dauphin—Swan River—Marquette, MB]

I appreciate that answer.

There possibly could be a federal role though. The management of inland fisheries is clearly under provincial jurisdiction, but again, your department has the salmonid enhancement program which is funded to almost $30 million a year.

Do you think there could be the possibility of replicating fisheries enhancement programs that provinces largely don't do? Could that be a possible role for the federal government?

[Keith Ashfield, Conservative, Fredericton, NB]

It's possible if the moneys were available to do that. It's always an issue of what we can afford to do.

I don't know if any of my officials have any comment to make on this.

Mr. Bevan.