Fisheries Committee on April 23rd, 2013

[David Burden]

It would cover the tourist season, so I think it would be closer to June, July, August, September timeframes. Clearly, it's going to be when your char are running, and that's going to be the big issue. But you can fly into a lot of these lakes. From a recreational perspective, I had the pleasure many years ago of flying into a couple of lakes in the Yukon. You can go in there any time and you can pull out some pretty monsters.

[Mike Allen, Conservative, Tobique—Mactaquac, NB]

I want to refer you to slide 10.

One of the comments you make here is that there are high fuel costs, high shipping costs, high Canadian dollar, and “...other employment opportunities have lead to an overall decrease in the commercial fisheries”.

I have two questions on that one. One, is an overall decrease in the commercial fisheries necessarily a bad thing if the resource is not being exploited? What is the economic impact on the communities from that? I guess that would be the first thing I would ask. And, two, where are those other employment opportunities arising?

[David Burden]

That's a very good question, and I probably skimmed over it too quickly.

It's really the age demographics. I'll give you an example. I was in the western Arctic, I guess it was last fall, and I was talking with some fishermen. Right now I think we have approximately about a dozen commercial fishers on Great Slave Lake. They're all probably a bit older than I am—maybe quite a bit older than I am. It's a pretty tough life. Their kids are at that age when they've got the opportunity of continuing in the tradition of the fishery or working in the mines or a resource industry. The reality is that there's just not the uptake. There are other opportunities, through resource development projects or the support for them, where clearly one can make an awful lot more money in an awful lot shorter period of time. As a result of that, we're not getting the uptake.

Now it's a little bit different in the eastern Arctic. I'm not sure why it is, but there are more of the youth who seem to be going down the road of exploring fisheries as an opportunity. We're seeing the same level of resource development projects, so I don't know if it's the community or the geography or what it is.

But we're really struggling, as I said, with only a dozen or so fishers on Great Slave Lake. That's not really going to be a viable fishery, unless some new blood and new growth comes into it, whereas in the eastern Arctic we're seeing a lot of youth showing an interest, so it's much more vibrant.

[Mike Allen, Conservative, Tobique—Mactaquac, NB]

Basically what you're saying, then, is the major players are some of these traditional fishers. Those are the major players with the licences in the region?

[David Burden]

In the western Arctic, yes, it's been the same people for a long period of time. In the eastern Arctic, obviously, we're looking at enterprise. Communities are using their licences, through their hunter-trapper organizations, and building it out for the community. So you've got probably a few people focusing on it, but it's benefiting the larger community, and you're getting a good cross-section of youth, as well as people who have been in the business for a period of time. The difference is that it is an emerging fishery.

[Mike Allen, Conservative, Tobique—Mactaquac, NB]

I'm picking up on one of the comments you talked about on the opening of the facilities. Is processing capacity and access an issue in the region? Where are the processing facilities for the fishery?

[David Burden]

There's Pangnirtung in the east, we've got Cambridge in the middle, and there's another plant in Hay River. Those would be the bigger ones. There is also a smaller capacity in other places like Rankin and a few others.

The biggest challenge is that there's a lot of fish in other areas, but it's the high transportation cost of getting it to the plant. Once you've got it into the plant, you've got to get it out. If you're talking about fresh fish.... There's not a lot of that that's easily brought out because of the high transportation costs and issues around air freight support. However, the plants that are making very good small markets and focusing on the truly north, truly wild brand, on char and that kind of stuff...a lot of the offshore catch is processed on the water and doesn't come in. It's either done on the high seas or it's actually done in Greenland. We don't benefit from that. It would be a question of having the capacity, and having the capacity in a place where you can get to in order to make it viable.

If you wanted to look at what the single obstacle is in terms of viability, it would be where it is versus where the market is. When you're shipping everything south or east to Europe or Asia, it's a high cost.

[The Chair, Conservative, Rodney Weston]

Mr. MacAulay.

[Lawrence MacAulay, Liberal, Cardigan, PE]

Thank you, Mr. Chair, and I want to welcome our witnesses and the good senator.

As you're fully aware, the major decline in the ice in the central Arctic...about 40% of the central Arctic Ocean is open to commercial fishery. Of course, that is in international waters.

Is there any potential for an agreement with other countries for the co-management of this? Is there a possibility an agreement can take place, and what would Canada's role be? Do we want to establish a regional fisheries organization for the central Arctic region? Should the Arctic Council have a role to play, considering that we have the chair of the Arctic Council?

[David Burden]

There are many questions there. You do that to me every time.

[Lawrence MacAulay, Liberal, Cardigan, PE]

I have a short period of time and they cut me off, so I have to ask a lot of stuff.

[David Burden]

Clearly, the theme for the Arctic Council is development for northerners. I think that is one of the platforms we could hitch to.

Your broader question is on what we do in the international waters and how we manage that. It's probably the main reason the Americans are focused on this. I don't think they're worried about what we and they are going to do. I think the worry is, what if, at mile one outside the boundary, somebody decides to come in and start prosecuting a fishery? What do you do? That opens up all kinds of questions. I think what you're really looking at is having to develop some kind of coalition of the willing. Even if you had a coalition of the willing, I think you'd have to look at what you do to enforce it.

We have our enforcement capabilities. We use the coast guard; we use Transport Canada; we use the Department of National Defence to expand the scope of our surveillance patrols and that kind of stuff. It would be a stretch for us and for the Americans to expand it beyond that. Even if you did, how would you prosecute it? There would probably have to be something more than the Arctic Council that would be able to put in the governance that would be necessary to put that forward.

It's a really good question. It's one that's garnering a lot of talk.

[Lawrence MacAulay, Liberal, Cardigan, PE]

Like China.

[David Burden]

I think when there's a resource that's available and you have a demand for it, people will come to look for it.

As you say, there is reduced ice coverage. I think it's important to remember that what we read in the media about reduced ice coverage does not mean no ice. There's still a lot of ice. It would not necessarily lend itself to prosecuting a fishery with traditional capture technology. You have to take all that into consideration.

I think the key is, as I've said in my remarks, ensuring you have the science to support it. We're charting new territory here. There's a lot we don't know about it: how fast stocks recover, how long it takes, and where they're coming from. Those kinds of issues would all have to be factored into that.

As I've said, with the information and preliminary data we have so far, particularly in the high western Arctic, it doesn't look viable.

[Lawrence MacAulay, Liberal, Cardigan, PE]

The fishery itself does not look viable.

[David Burden]

We're looking at very small fish. We're seeing high numbers of them, but we're not seeing the size of fish that would make it commercially viable. If you had a big fish versus a small fish, which are you going to prosecute? That's what the research has shown us so far.

Dave, I don't know, is there any...?

[David Gillis]

I can maybe elaborate a little bit on just a couple of points. We are talking in these percentages about the extent of open water in the summer period. It's obviously still fully iced in the winter. This has been increasing over time, and the estimates vary on when we'll get to a summer where there's no ice at all. It could be 2030—you might hear that in the near term. Other folks are saying 2050. It bounces around.

Dave's points are very well taken. The thing about this central Arctic Ocean area is that it is an Arctic ocean. It's a very cold ocean, and the productivity regime in there is still driven by cold factors. Fish are small, as Dave says, and the productivity regime is simply not there to produce the kinds of fish in the sizes you would want and in the abundance you would want to support commercial operations as we understand them.

That could change. I don't think it's imminent in any way, but I think that is one of the things that we need to begin to monitor over time. The kinds of studies we're starting to do in the western Arctic are giving us a good baseline and some good insight into how those ecosystems work so that we'll see those changes coming.

The other point I'd make, just in closing, is that, again, when we look at that whole key area in the middle that doesn't belong to anyone, that's extraordinarily deep water. There's very little shelf in there to work with, and it's usually on the shelves, when you have a more productive ocean, that you get your large biomass. That will be a factor in the future as well.

[Lawrence MacAulay, Liberal, Cardigan, PE]

Thank you very much.

Basically, we haven't dealt with any other country other than the U.S. to this point.

[Blair Hodgson]

There have been some discussions amongst the five coastal states of the Arctic. As Dave and Dave mentioned, we are talking about the high seas in the central area, so outside the specific economic zones of all the coastal countries.

There have been some discussions. There has been some joint scientific work as well, and we are looking far into the future to when this would be ice free. The discussions are preliminary at this point. There is some studying. I would like to note, however, that it is not a legal vacuum either. The international Convention on the Law of the Sea applies in this area, and so would the UN convention on straddling and highly migratory fish stocks. It's not a complete loophole area, even though it is still covered by ice.

Certainly the U.S. has past experience with fisheries opening internationally before the institutions have caught up with them, which is probably what prompted them to take a leadership role in encouraging other countries to start focusing now on what could be the fishery in the future.

[The Chair, Conservative, Rodney Weston]

Thank you very much, Mr. MacAulay.

We'll now move to the five-minute round. We'll start off with Mr. Donnelly.

[Fin Donnelly, NDP, New Westminster—Coquitlam, BC]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Thank you to our DFO panellists.

I just want to start off with climate change and the impacts. Scientists are telling us that the Arctic and northern areas are warming at twice the rate of anywhere else on the planet, and there was a reference made that by 2030 or 2050 it could be ice free. Obviously this is an issue.

How much of an issue or an impact is it on the fishery, and what are the concerns or the perspectives of the local fishing industry? What are their concerns and perspectives? What is our available science on that? Do we need more? Do we have adequate...? What is the role there?

[David Burden]

I'll start and then pass it off to Dave or Blair.

Clearly we're seeing some species that we wouldn't traditionally see in waters. We're seeing orcas, killer whales, moving into waters that we haven't seen them in for probably decades. That is obviously having some impact on other marine mammals and fisheries.

The Inuit don't really like orcas. They look at them as being a bit invasive. I guess that would be one way of looking at it. They don't like the meat, and they have impacts on narwhals and beluga and so on, so there are challenges with that.

Obviously there have been migrations of different species of fish.

Dave, maybe you'd like to speak to a little bit of that.

Our fishery surveys are giving us insights into some of this, but we're assuming that as we see different currents and different temperatures we'll see different migrations and increases or decreases in the resource.

[David Gillis]

Thanks, Dave.

The department does have a program that is bringing some resources now to these kinds of questions. They are very important questions, and we do expect that over this time period—that's a little hard to define right now—there will be changes that we need to understand and there will be adaptations that we will need to make ourselves and assist other Canadians to make as well in their areas.

But we're one of eight departments that have been funded to do some work in this area. In our department, it's called the aquatic climate change adaptation services program, ACCASP. It's in the middle of a five-year run right now.

There are three principal activities—they all include the Arctic—that we have done and are doing under this program. We've done a very detailed risk assessment of what changes we might expect in all of the areas, all of the aquatic areas in Canada, including or defining the Arctic as one, to help us identify what are the threats and what are the opportunities, even, because it's not necessarily all negative. We simply want to know what these changes are going to be. Based on that, we can then use that as a platform to identify where we may need to adapt DFO programs and decision-making systems in order to account for a change in climate in the future.

So we've been doing these risk analyses. They're just finishing up. They will be available publicly before very long. It's a very large document, so it takes a bit of time to get it into good shape.

We also, as part of this program, have some funding that we can use and are using for two types of scientific studies. Well, one is really scientific, the other is more general.

We have funds to help us better understand specific climate changes that might be the types of changes related to an area where we would want to adapt in the future, to develop a tool to maybe make decisions differently in the future than we do now.

We have a second fund that is actually working on adaptation tools now, areas where we have sufficient science information to maybe design a decision-making system to account for a climate change effect and bring those changes into effect in the near term.

So we have quite a few projects around the country. A number of them are specific to the Arctic, on such subject matters as changing fisheries, distributions, understanding how primary productivity in the ocean is going to change or likely to change as a result of climate change. These are things like phytoplankton and zooplankton, because they're at the base of the food chain that supports the fisheries, which we would then have an interest in.

Invasive species is another big one as well, of course. When climatic conditions change, then this creates opportunities for species that are not endemic to an area to move in, and sometimes there are harmful consequences of this.

So to get to your question, some things that we are currently doing will help the department and therefore help Canadians adapt to a change in climate across the country, but there are specific things that we are doing in the Arctic.

[Fin Donnelly, NDP, New Westminster—Coquitlam, BC]

Do I have any time left?

[The Chair, Conservative, Rodney Weston]

No.