Fisheries Committee on Dec. 10th, 2013

[Nadia Bouffard, Acting Senior Assistant Deputy Minister, Strategic Policy, Department of Fisheries and Oceans]

There are none to my knowledge. We're not involved in that arrangement.

[David Bevan]

As I pointed out, just to add to that, our responsibility is the management of the fisheries. We really don't want to lose our focus on what our responsibilities are. We do want to work in partnership through CCFAM and ACFAM, under the governmental arrangements. We want to work in cooperation with the provinces, but we want to stick to our knitting, which is the management of the fisheries. We're going to leave to other government departments the issue of that fund and how to handle it.

[Ryan Cleary, NDP, St. John's South—Mount Pearl, NL]

DFO is not going to have any input whatsoever on this money that's been set aside for the Newfoundland and Labrador fisheries.

[David Bevan]

We have no plans to get engaged in that at all at this point.

[The Chair, Conservative, Rodney Weston]

Thank you.

Mr. Leef.

[Ryan Leef, Conservative, Yukon, YT]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

I'd like to thank you all for coming today. It's good to see everyone again.

Mr. Kamp talked a bit about the Fisheries Act changes earlier, and I'd like to go back to that.

When this was being undertaken, the opposition coined a very cute phrase, “gutting the Fisheries Act”. Is that a fair characterization of what was done to the Fisheries Act?

[David Bevan]

The act in the past was designed to protect habitat for habitat's sake, not linked to the productivity of fisheries, etc.

It put us into some fairly strange circumstances where we would be preventing somebody from draining flooded land, where if you cleared a ditch and some fish showed up, your property was all of a sudden part of fish habitat and you couldn't deal with it. That seemed to be a loss of focus. We were also dealing with thousands of referrals each year that were related to those kinds of projects that didn't relate to productivity of fisheries.

The idea of the Fisheries Act changes was to really focus on the actions needed to protect productive habitat that supported fisheries and to avoid wasting people's time, and wasting our time, dealing with something where we got onto farmers' lands, onto ponds that were created, onto various other kinds of “fish habitat”, that really weren't of any relevance to the protection of fish for the purposes of recreational, aboriginal, and commercial fisheries.

As my colleagues pointed out, that covers off a large amount. If a province licenses people to fish throughout the jurisdiction that they're responsible for, then that's a fishery.

Therefore, I think we can demonstrate that we are taking some pretty good steps to protect the habitat that's important and to focus our efforts in a way that doesn't get us into somebody's personal property for the purpose of protecting habitat for habitat's sake, and not for looking after the fisheries that we are responsible for, or that are administered by others.

[Ryan Leef, Conservative, Yukon, YT]

The act, in fact, still has the term “habitat” in it.

[David Bevan]

Yes, and it has stronger provisions and gives us better authorities.

Kevin, did you want to add detail? I know you have a lot more.

[Kevin Stringer]

What it says is you can't cause serious harm to fish that are part of a commercial, recreational, or aboriginal fishery, or to fish that support such a fishery.

“Serious harm” is defined. “Serious harm” is defined as the death of the fish or the permanent alteration or destruction of the habitat. “Habitat” is defined. It's still in there.

“Serious harm” is different from what it had, “Harmful alteration, disruption, or destruction”, but “habitat” is still in there.

[Ryan Leef, Conservative, Yukon, YT]

Part of that expanded definition talks about the life processes of fish.

There are a million scenarios out there but the anecdotal one is always easier for people to grasp onto. If you can picture a storyline, then people understand this more clearly.

If you have a body of water that's a creek that doesn't have a single fish in it at all, but it flows into a creek, a river, or a lake that has a viable fishery in it, that upstream water, because it influences the life processes of fish, would also be protected.

[Kevin Stringer]

It depends on the circumstances, but in your anecdote, yes.

If there is a headlands that is very important to a fishery downstream, that's protected. Habitat, as you pointed out, is very broadly defined. It's defined as anything that's supportive of the overall life processes. We've done some work with our science community to be able to better understand what that means on a practical day-to-day basis. It will mean different things in different places, but it is meant to ensure that we are genuinely protecting fisheries and not just the fish.

[Ryan Leef, Conservative, Yukon, YT]

Thank you.

I have a two-part question on this.

I spend a lot of time talking to my constituents in Yukon about the changes that were being undertaken and articulating the need for them and where we thought we were going with them. In large part, and I'm not going to be kind here, the opposition doesn't help anything at all when they fearmonger and throw that kind of thing around without actually giving it the due care and attention it deserves. I'm not expecting you to wade into a political debate here with this. When your staff are trying—

[The Chair, Conservative, Rodney Weston]

Ask your question very quickly.

[Ryan Leef, Conservative, Yukon, YT]

Okay.

Does that impact your operations negatively when you're trying to fight that off? How have you been able to work positively with those changes?

[David Bevan]

That's a communications issue for us. It's not an operational issue. The operational staff deal with the proposals that come to them. The proponents are generally focused on their job and our people are focused on their job, respectively.

I don't see that as impacting on operations. It does impact on communications, but that's a different situation.

[The Chair, Conservative, Rodney Weston]

Thank you, Mr. Leef.

Mr. Sopuck.

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

I'm going to ask a series of short, quick questions, hopefully, and also get some short answers.

Mr. Bevan, you talked about the number of reviews under the old Fisheries Act and compared it with the situation now. How many annual habitat reviews would you have done under the old Fisheries Act, and how many reviews do you anticipate will be done under the new act?

[David Bevan]

In the past we were doing 12,000. We reduced that to 8,000 by changing policies.

I don't think we have enough water under the bridge right now to give you a number for the new act.

[Kevin Stringer]

Fifteen years ago it was about 12,500, as David said. Then we did the operational statements and it went down to about 8,000. This has been designed so that we think we will be looking at 1,000.

I know you want to go to other questions here, but the reality is that we know, from the years of experience, what types of projects are likely to cause serious harm. You will see it on our website now. Hopefully, we'll move forward with regulations on this in the future, but we'll be able to say we're confident that we have....

We ended up doing about 400 or so authorizations: so 8,000 projects, 400 authorizations. We're now going to look probably at about 1,000. We might start with something higher in the first year, and then probably less than 400 authorizations, but not an enormous amount less than 400.

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

Are you confident that under the new regime, Canada's overall fish production and fish utilization, out of the fish populations that people actually care about, nothing will change in terms of a decline in fishing quality?

[Kevin Stringer]

I think the objective is actually to have better fisheries protection results. With the new recreational fisheries partnership program, with the partnership provisions of the act, with us looking at the most significant impacts on fisheries of projects, and with new offsetting guides and funds from environmental penalties to the environmental damages fund, the objective overall is better results.

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

That's a really interesting point. In terms of those offsets, do we have the potential of unleashing millions of dollars from, let's say, natural resource companies who are doing habitat offsets to offset any habitat changes that they have made? Do we have that potential?

[Kevin Stringer]

Yes. It's not called an offsetting policy. It's called a fisheries productivity investment policy, but it includes an offsetting guide. Basically the new regulation says that if you're planning to cause a negative impact to the fishery and to fisheries productivity, you need an offsetting proposal. There's a set of guidelines in the new policy that enables....

Again, we hope to partner the folks who are causing this damage with the local proponents who are working on watershed work to get the best results.

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

In terms of major projects, I think Mr. Chisholm talked about projects in northern B.C. Let's focus on pipelines and roads for a minute.

Are you confident that we have the standards in place, the design criteria and the engineering expertise to design and construct stream crossings, both road crossings and pipeline crossings, that will be very environmentally safe and will conserve fish and fish habitat?