Fisheries Committee on April 21st, 2015

[Dr. Brian Riddell]

It's $8 million from other donations—from foundations, private individuals, and corporations.

[John Weston, Conservative, West Vancouver—Sunshine Coast—Sea to Sky Country, BC]

Again, there's tension between the two. You recognize it, you deal with it deftly, and you get great support from the community.

Let me distinguish between grassroots and grass tops. In terms of the leadership that the foundation provides, you can talk about all those numbers and people in the communities doing what they do, but you also started with a group of distinguished people whose names and reputations added to the appeal of the foundation.

Do you want to comment on that? I'm thinking of all the recreational fisheries organizations around the province that will be looking to the foundation as a model. How do you choose your board? How do you make sure that you have the kind of reputation that the foundation has managed to maintain?

[Dr. Brian Riddell]

I think we were fortunate to have an extremely strong initial board. George Hungerford was asked by Minister Tom Siddon at the time to chair it and to find other board members. We had the Honourable John Fraser become an early board member and John Woodward with the Woodward family name in B.C. There were very select groups, or individuals, selected to be the initial board. We had strong representation from the first nations. Bob Wright represented the recreational sector very passionately as only Bob could.

We did benefit from having a strong board leadership in the early going. Now we take a more strategic approach to replacing board members and the current composition in terms of their expertise. Do we have sufficient number of people on it to enable corporate fundraising and reaching out to people? Do we have people with the expertise in the recreational sectors? We have two members who are prominent in the lodge industry. We do look carefully at board membership, but it's always about accountability and composition of the board.

[The Chair, Conservative, Rodney Weston]

Thank you very much.

Mr. MacAulay.

[Lawrence MacAulay, Liberal, Cardigan, PE]

Thank you very much, Mr. Chair. I want to welcome the witnesses here today. Dr. Riddell, it's interesting that most of the funding that you access is now from the private sector I take it.

[Dr. Brian Riddell]

Yes it is.

[Lawrence MacAulay, Liberal, Cardigan, PE]

You talk about the stamp funds and education in one sentence. I think education is vitally important. I'd like you to elaborate a bit on what you do in the education line. That is important in my opinion.

[Dr. Brian Riddell]

I agree. Most of our education funds are not stamp funds. I think the percentage of stamp funds shown in the text of my remarks is 23% for education, outreach, and training. The education amount is probably in the range of 10% to 15%. It always differs between the years.

[Lawrence MacAulay, Liberal, Cardigan, PE]

What dollars would that represent?

[Dr. Brian Riddell]

Probably something like $100,000 or less each year. What we do with it is that we have a program in B.C. called incubators in the classroom. There's a core curriculum in the education program about Pacific salmon and the ecosystems in B.C. Fundamentally we support them. There's one program that we support that you may have seen out here, and it's very common in B.C. If you have public schools with frost aluminium fences everywhere, we have colourful fish that become big streams and they're wooden fish that are cut out. It's part of a curriculum program where they teach children about not putting contaminants in drains, marking stream drains, and teaching them that all drains lead to salmon habitat.

[Lawrence MacAulay, Liberal, Cardigan, PE]

How long have you been at this and could you give an idea of the success? I think it's so important. We have done a number of studies here on invasive species and this type of thing, which have caused so much trouble for governments and everyone else. I think education in all areas is so important. Is it just in the institutions that you're in, or do you do education other than that? Are you talking about what you do in schools and on the fences? I guess that would be out of the schools.

[Dr. Brian Riddell]

I think the Pacific Salmon Foundation is mostly focused on supporting the school programs. Other educators that go into schools, such as the Stream of Dreams Society I just described, are working right across North America. I think they're only about 12 years old and yet have won 12 national awards for education. It's very successful.

I think in reaching outside of schools alone, the Freshwater Fisheries Society and the Family Fishing Society are like that. Those are more community based organizations and they're supported by a lot of what Al and I have talked about today. We in the Salmon Foundation are currently reviewing our strategic plan and looking at a significant increase in investment in educational programs. It could be through new publications, or it could be through a lot more money into trips to see salmon in the rivers and to talk about it, and that sort of thing.

[Lawrence MacAulay, Liberal, Cardigan, PE]

You indicated that there were 345 groups getting funding. Could you give the committee an idea of what the groups do? What is the allocated funding used for? It would be a wide range I would imagine, but in general.

[Dr. Brian Riddell]

Absolutely, it's a very wide range. In the beginning, the logo of the salmon foundation rather captures it: bring them back, stream by stream.

These were very much local community organizations that had salmon in local streams. These streams required habitat restoration. You have to get rid of the shopping carts and the tires and whatever is there, so they would go in and do these stream clean-ups.

We've now evolved really beyond that. We're now looking at habitat restoration. For a long time, people used to take woody debris out of streams. It turns out that this was a really bad idea. It just makes a stream into a straight chute, so it's more like a stream drain. You have to restructure streams, and we look for recreating what they call riffles and pools.

All of this work is done under the technical guidance of the department or what we call registered professional biologists. They do a wide variety of small stream activity. We're now branching out more into the estuary work and to larger river systems. In many of these cases, you have to work with registered biologists, because it becomes more dangerous in larger systems.

These programs are evolving, and that's why the recreational fisheries conservation partnerships program has come at an opportune time for us to build on. They also do educational programs. They have their own programs whereby they go into schools, and they do a lot of enhancement.

The community enhancement program started with DFO's salmonid enhancement program in the early 1980s. Many of our community organizations now manage small community hatcheries. These are not our major hatchery production systems; these are small ones that would put out the tens of thousands of Chinook, coho, and chum salmon. Small hatcheries are the second biggest draw on our community salmon moneys.

Then we do stream enhancement restoration by opening up side channels that have become isolated from the flow. If you reconnect it, you immediately get benefits of fish production.

They build on their own partnerships. We have other organizations in the province, such as the B.C. Conservation Foundation, a very professional group that works in water management, now building small dams in some of the coastal lakes so that we can address climate change in the future.

So there are areas with a wide diversity of activities that these people get into. They're very creative.

[Lawrence MacAulay, Liberal, Cardigan, PE]

Thank you very much.

Mr. Martin, from looking at the economic and cultural impact of the recreational fishery and at the recommendations that were made at the Cohen commission, are there recommendations that you feel should be implemented that have not been implemented? Are there recommendations that you think would do a lot more to help the recreational fishery in British Columbia?

Do you feel, also, that removing fish habitat protection from the Fisheries Act and cutting the funding has any effect? I'd like you to respond to that.

[Alan Martin]

I think an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. The fisheries protection program has been realigned, and the jury is still out concerning its ongoing effectiveness.

In a number of areas there needs to be greater investment. Some of them are related to Cohen and some of them aren't. I certainly think of hatchery transformation and modernization and increased scientific research and development to understand both how the environment is changing and how fish behaviour is changing with the aquaculture industry, but also with all the other cumulative effects that are going on.

[Lawrence MacAulay, Liberal, Cardigan, PE]

Mr. Martin, I hate to interrupt you, but are you indicating that we need more funding for scientific research? Is that what you're indicating would help and what you're recommending?

[Alan Martin]

Yes, sir, I am recommending that.

[Lawrence MacAulay, Liberal, Cardigan, PE]

Thank you very much.

I interrupted you; I apologize. Continue.

[Alan Martin]

The focus of Cohen was restricted to the return of the sockeye salmon. I think investment in the west coast, not only for recreational fisheries but for all other fisheries, needs to deal with the sustainability issues and deal with how the resource is evolving and changing over time in the face of development and climate change, and not just with one specific species in one specific timeframe. I think there needs to be a much more comprehensive view of the relationship between fish and fish habitat in both the freshwater and marine ecosystems.

[Lawrence MacAulay, Liberal, Cardigan, PE]

Thank you very much.

Concerning quotas and looking possibly at the halibut fishery, there's always, as you know, a tug-of-war between the recreational fishery and the commercial fishery. Would you have any recommendations or any words of wisdom for the committee as to how this could be handled in probably a more favourable way for both sides?

[Alan Martin]

First of all, from a scientific perspective, I think the halibut fishery is very well managed. I think there can be increased fisheries catch monitoring on the recreational side, but ultimately the decision around allocation is a policy decision—a political one, not a scientific one.

I think we need to be very clear. Science will inform you in terms of where the opportunities are or where the threats are to the overall harvest of halibut, both in B.C. and in other U.S. states that harvest halibut. How you apportion that halibut in B.C. among the recreational, the aboriginal, and the commercial sectors is ultimately a policy decision between the commercial and the recreational fisheries, and there are certainly some issues in terms of first nations' constitutional rights for food, social, and ceremonial purposes that may apply to that fishery as well.

[The Chair, Conservative, Rodney Weston]

Thank you very much, Mr. MacAulay.

Mr. Sopuck.

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

Thank you.

Just to correct my friend, Mr. MacAulay, the habitat provisions of the Fisheries Act are still there, and I recommend that he look at section 35.

Regarding the Cohen commission, which has been brought up a few times, Cohen's mandate ended in 2009. Funnily enough, the sockeye runs in Fraser of 2010 and 2014 were the highest in history. I found that very interesting.

A study done out of Cornell University not that long ago looked at the conservation efforts of the hunting community. I have the honour of chairing the Conservative Hunting and Angling Caucus, and I deal with hunters and anglers across the country. Their conservation passion never ceases to amaze me. This particular study from Cornell talked about hunters—and it applies to anglers as well—as “conservation superstars” who get little credit for what they do, but it's incalculable in terms of the contribution to society.

I had the honour last summer of visiting the Oyster River enhancement project and saw, Dr. Riddell, exactly what you were talking about in the very gentle environmental enhancement that went on to produce and protect that salmon run. It was extremely impressive.

Dr. Riddell, I'd like to ask you specifically, what can we do to enhance Pacific salmon stocks? I know that as biologists one of our first responses is “more research”, and I can certainly accept that, but in terms of actual, active projects, what can we do to enhance Pacific salmon stocks?

[Dr. Brian Riddell]

Well, we're doing a lot, as you hopefully have heard. As for where we can do more, there's an unlimited amount of work we could do in habitat, and we really do have to scale that over time because there are certain capacities.

One of the big areas that I think we're finding in terms of restoration of production is in the estuaries. On the west coast, we have one real model of success here with the Campbell River, which used to be a highly industrialized estuary. But if you were to see it now—and I think there are videos of it—you would see that it really is a natural-looking estuary that still has development around it but is greatly improved. Unfortunately, we have many examples of these.

We're also finding that in terms of big changes in production you need to really identify the stocks that are contributing significantly. What are the big producers? A lot of these tend to be in the Fraser River. The lower Fraser is certainly an area of great concern on the west coast because of future development there. A lot of people are very concerned about what we are going to be able to do to maintain capacity in the lower Fraser River.

I think we also have to keep in mind that one of the things we are losing is the stock assessment base, and we really do need to understand what populations are doing well or what are not, so you can tease out why. I have a great example of that. On Saturday, I was working with an angling group called the Avid Anglers, in the Strait of Georgia. They gave us the results of DNA analyses from catch in the Strait of Georgia.

It turns out that the majority of the fish they sampled last summer came from an area where we do almost nothing. It's natural habitat. It's the whole mainland coast around Powell River, Sechelt, and up into Johnstone Strait. It was so different from anything I'd seen that I really questioned them on how they could get that, but I think what it's telling us about is the power of natural habitat. We have to maintain and get the diversity of fish into the habitat. So that that means, really, that we have to know the abundance, and we have to regulate the fisheries, which the department has done for years. These animals have the capacity to come back, but the common factor in all of these is that they have to change from fresh water to salt water through estuaries.