Fisheries Committee on May 3rd, 2018

[The Chair, Liberal, Bernadette Jordan]

Thank you, Mr. Sporer. I have to cut you off there. That's the 10 minutes, and we have to go to our first round of questioning.

For the first five minutes, we have Mr. Morrissey, please.

[Bobby Morrissey, Liberal, Egmont, PE]

Thank you, Madam Chair.

My question is for Ms. Burridge.

In your comments, you referenced the need for stability and predictability in the licensing policy. You referenced social policy as a part of licensing conditions, and that it was scaring young people from the industry. We had, in a previous meeting, several young B.C. fishers present to the committee. Their concern was the lack of protection of owner-operators within the B.C. fishery.

You claim to represent more than 90% of the commercially harvested seafood. How does that relate to the actual number of fishers who harvest?

[Christina Burridge]

I represent associations, basically harvesting associations in the major fisheries, so their members would be the actual fishermen who harvest fish. Broadly speaking, I think we've definitely seen a chill at every level, from harvesting to processing. It was started, I suppose, by the Clearwater decision, where it appears that the stability that everyone thought they had in their licence—that it's basically evergreen because it will be renewed each year—is simply not there anymore. No one can run a business if their livelihood might be taken away from them.

[Bobby Morrissey, Liberal, Egmont, PE]

My question is from the perspective of the independence of the inshore fisher and the owner-operator provisions of the bill. This was the area where we heard substantive testimony from young fishers who are concerned that the model on the west coast is not protecting the communities that depend on the fishery, that it is not protecting the independence of the fisher, that there is too much focus on the corporate fishery, and that this culture is actually influencing whether people speak out on these issues or not, that they are intimidated to speak on this issue.

Could you comment on that?

[Christina Burridge]

Most fishermen on the west coast are, indeed, independent. I've never experienced, myself, that people in the fishery are intimidated in terms of speaking out. We certainly have plenty of examples of young fishermen who have come into the business or who have taken over from other generations. Because of the way things are currently set up, it is certainly possible for people to buy in over time in such a way that they can actually participate effectively in a range of fisheries.

I think you have to understand, given the points that Chris made about the.... We simply don't have the fish that we used to have. It is not possible for a fisherman to make a living operating in one fishery. Therefore, I think it's impossible to see how owner-operator on west coast would work.

[Bobby Morrissey, Liberal, Egmont, PE]

But owner-operator is not restricted to one fishery. The premise behind owner-operator is to protect the integrity of the core fishery, the inshore fishery, and to ensure that the ability to fish, whether it's through quota allocation or gear methodology, is kept away from the corporate sector, that there's a clear division between the corporate sector and the concern of people holding licencing and the ability to fish who are not on board the boats, who are not actually participating in the fishery.

[Christina Burridge]

Virtually every fisherman in B.C. operates through a corporation, so yes, you could say that corporate interests dominate. That's because that's how the fishery is structured in B.C. Individuals are corporations for tax and liability reasons.

[Bobby Morrissey, Liberal, Egmont, PE]

Yes, but is it transparent who owns the corporation? Is it transparent that the corporation is owned individually by the core fisher who has the quota?

[Christina Burridge]

Do you want to take that?

[Chris Sporer]

Yes, you can get, from the DFO web page, who owns which licence. You can get that information from DFO.

[The Chair, Liberal, Bernadette Jordan]

Thank you very much, Mr. Morrissey. That's your five minutes.

We go now to Mr. Arnold for his five minutes, please.

[Mel Arnold, Conservative, North Okanagan—Shuswap, BC]

Thank you, Madam Chair.

Thank you to all of our witnesses here this morning. We're going through a lot of witnesses in a short time on this study, so I'll keep my questions relatively brief and hopefully I can get questions to all of you.

For Mr. Lapointe and Mr. Browne, you use the term ”residual harm” quite often. I see the reference to HADD and harm being in the bill, but not residual harm.

Would you like to elaborate on that a bit further, because I see harm in many different ways. Someone wading in a stream to go fishing could actually be harming fish habitat. Where do we define residual harm or impactful harm versus what's really temporary, minimal, and bearable?

[Nick Lapointe]

I think when you get to something like someone wading in a stream, streams are dynamic and they create their own habitat over time if they have proper watershed conditions, so that's easily recoverable. Riding an ATV through a stream is another matter.

But I think the examples we tried to show were that there are many clear situations right now where there's significant infilling, several square metres, even several hundred square metres of infilling, where that habitat is absolutely eliminated. Those types of projects aren't currently being compensated for by DFO or by proponents.

That's a serious concern. We would like to address those situations where there's unambiguous residual harm, and the more dynamic types of habitat shifts, I think, are another matter.

[Mel Arnold, Conservative, North Okanagan—Shuswap, BC]

Thank you.

You also mentioned third-party habitat banking. Would you like to elaborate a little further on how you see that working, through conservation organizations being permitted to do work and sell their work basically? Would that be how you see that operating?

[Nick Lapointe]

Yes, absolutely.

In the U.S., it's actually consulting companies, habitat banking companies, that are undertaking that work, and it's been a quite successful model in the U.S. Certainly, we would like to see conservation organizations, like Trout Unlimited or the Nature Conservancy of Canada, who do restoration projects, be able to sell credits from those projects.

The key consideration would be that there would need to be additionality, so when you create a habitat it's not going to be the same as a natural habitat. If those conservation organizations could sell those credits at two or three to one, and use those funds to do more restoration work, we would set ourselves on a path that would both spiral our resources for restoration and also create a very efficient and easy system for proponents to buy into when they need an offset.

[Mel Arnold, Conservative, North Okanagan—Shuswap, BC]

Just quickly, would you prefer to see that done through conservation organizations or through corporations specializing in that?

[David Browne]

I think a combination.

[Nick Lapointe]

Yes. Personally, I'm interested in seeing conservation organizations be involved in that, but we're very receptive to having both involved in third-party habitat banking.

[Mel Arnold, Conservative, North Okanagan—Shuswap, BC]

Thank you.

Quickly moving on to Mr. Sporer and Ms. Burridge.

Can you describe, just briefly, how we got to a different situation on the west coast than the east coast, and what the circumstances are in competing at world market prices and scale of economics and so on? Could you possibly give us a little indication of how we got to where we are?

[Chris Sporer]

I'll take a crack at it first.

I think if you look at a lot of fisheries, where they started from there was significant overcapacity in the fisheries, so there was overharvesting and poor economic returns. For instance, in the early 1990s, among salmon fishermen who were only focused on the salmon fishery, 75% of the fleet, according to DFO reports, was basically making negative economic returns.

The industry's made changes also because of safety. Racing for the fish means vessels may be forced to fish in inclement weather, so these changes have led to industry and fishermen coming forward and saying, look, we want to change; we want to look at different ways of doing it. That's how the fisheries evolved over time. It's evolved more recently to address things like bycatch.

With respect to competing on world markets, we are a price-taker in world markets. We are a high-cost volume producer. Our biggest competitor is Alaska, just to the north of us. They catch the same fish, produce the same products, and sell them into the same markets. We have to be competitive with them or we will lose those markets.

[The Chair, Liberal, Bernadette Jordan]

Thank you, Mr. Arnold.

I am now going to Mr. Donnelly for five minutes, please.

[Fin Donnelly, NDP, Port Moody—Coquitlam, BC]

Thank you, Madam Chair.

Thank you to all our witnesses for your testimony.

I'll start with the Canadian Wildlife Federation.

Dr. Lapointe, you packed a lot of recommendations into your testimony. I don't know if I'm going to get through many of them with five minutes, but I'll give it a try.

It seems from your words that fish habitat is critically important. You talked about an online registry, and from that I got the importance of the criteria or standards that would allow proponents to get their projects approved. Then you mentioned auditing.

Do you have wording or suggestions in your submission that this committee could look at to strengthen what you're talking about here?

[Nick Lapointe]

Yes, I think in our specific submission, we don't go into detail about either the registry or the auditing, but some of the joint submissions we're participating in with other NGOs do address that.

Ultimately, any project that either harms or has the potential to harm fish habitat should at the very least be reported to DFO so that DFO is aware of it and can assess cumulative effects, which is important. We also want them to address cumulative effects. We recognize that DFO doesn't have the resources to investigate anything but a fraction of the projects that occur in Canada, but if we're going to allow proponents to self-assess, work efficiently, and follow best practices in the water, that's excellent.

We just need to be able to make sure they're accountable. Whether that's auditing a random subset of 1% or 5% of these projects, that would provide that accountability and it would also allow us to review different classes of projects to find out where best management practices guidelines are working, where this is an effective system, and where the system needs to be resolved.

It's not all about enforcement or accountability for proponents. It's also about improving how we manage fish habitat.

[Fin Donnelly, NDP, Port Moody—Coquitlam, BC]

You mentioned net gain and net loss. You cited examples of scientists who are saying that we're not doing very well on the west coast in terms of net gain of habitat. In fact, we're doing a net loss, and they're predicting more of the same unless we change. Is that a focus on monitoring? What's going to improve it?

[Nick Lapointe]

Yes, it needs to go beyond monitoring. We need to make sure that, with all these small projects that cause harm, the harm is addressed by some mechanism, and we're pretty open-minded as to how that will prevent that loss.

The other challenge is that, for larger projects, any situation where there is an offset, to date, DFO has been allowing 1:1 ratios or even smaller than 1:1 ratios. All of the science we have reviewed on habitat offsetting requires additionality. It may be 2:1. It may be 5:1. It's situationally dependent, but there's no science. There's been no research produced to date that suggests that a 1:1 ratio will make up for the loss of a natural habitat. That's simply because we're only learning now how to restore habitats, and we will never restore them with the same capacity as what was there before, certainly not in the scientific perspective on average. We need to ensure that those ratios are fixed with a minimum of greater than 1:1 to make sure we achieve no net loss and, ideally, net gain.