Evidence of meeting #112 for Fisheries and Oceans in the 42nd Parliament, 1st Session. (The original version is on Parliament’s site, as are the minutes.) The winning word was audit.
A recording is available from Parliament.
5:20 p.m.
Liberal
Bobby Morrissey Liberal Egmont, PE
Your audit would look at both sides. I mean, your audit should look at decreasing numbers, which would put at risk...as well as a significant growing population, and what may attribute to both.
Have you done any analysis on that?
5:20 p.m.
Commissioner of the Environment and Sustainable Development, Office of the Auditor General
We have not done anything specific on it. In our audit we identified what criteria we used to deal with the protection of marine mammals, so we looked at the tools that the federal government has, the policy on managing bycatch. They have the Species at Risk Act. They have marine protected areas. Those are all the tools they use. Other than the species at risk that are enumerated in our audit, we didn't look at any other specific species.
5:25 p.m.
Liberal
Bobby Morrissey Liberal Egmont, PE
When the department puts in place measures to protect a mammal and then that particular species is growing at significant numbers, is there any mechanism there to trigger any reaction?
5:25 p.m.
Commissioner of the Environment and Sustainable Development, Office of the Auditor General
You would have to ask the department that.
5:25 p.m.
Mr. Ken McDonald (Avalon, Lib.)
Thank you, Mr. Morrissey.
I do want to apologize. I was looking at the list we wrote down here and I inadvertently went back to the government side twice in a row instead of going to the Conservative side as I should have, so I'll do that now.
I will ask if everyone agrees to extend it for maybe five minutes or so.
Do you have to go? All right.
We have Mr. Calkins for five minutes.
5:25 p.m.
Blaine Calkins Red Deer—Lacombe, CPC
Thank you, Chair. I apologize for being late to the meeting. I have a keen interest in this. I believe my colleague Mr. Sopuck probably touched on most of the items that are important to me.
As I'm reading through your recommendations, Madam Commissioner, it seems to me the issue that you cite on page 1 of your report, which is the depletion of food sources by fisheries, seems to indicate that the only depletion of the food source is through fisheries, commercial and/or sport fishing, and not through other natural causes. There seems to be no reference to any of these recommendations made to the Department of Fisheries and Oceans or others, including Parks Canada, on wildlife management controls.
There is some loose language—I don't mean it in a negative way—that I would like some clarification on. Regarding paragraph 2.42, at the end of the very first paragraph in Fisheries and Oceans Canada's response, it says,“These networks will include marine protected areas established under the Oceans Act and marine refuges established under the Fisheries Act, as well as other departments’ conservation tools.”
That whole paragraph talks about what the Department of Fisheries and Oceans is doing. None of the recommendations that I see actually address the fact that there's not enough salmon in the ocean. They talk about shutting everything down that might be causing a reduction in salmon in the ocean, but I don't see a single recommendation or a single notion anywhere here about enhancing the number of salmon that might be in the ocean.
Did you have any conversations with anybody at the department or from any of the departments that talked about anything that pertained to salmon enhancement?
5:25 p.m.
Commissioner of the Environment and Sustainable Development, Office of the Auditor General
In this audit, the salmon issue came up because of the southern resident killer whale situation off the coast of British Columbia.
We've done another audit on integrated fisheries management plans, which we could come and talk to you about, where we looked at the federal government. We looked at how well the government is doing in managing its fisheries, the whole 172 different fish stocks that DFO is supposed to manage. We also spoke earlier about the salmon aquaculture audit where we did talk quite a bit about the fact that they weren't monitoring the health of wild fish while they were at the same time dealing with salmon aquaculture. We have talked about salmon in other audits. Other than dealing with it for the chinook salmon that was affecting that one species at risk, we did not deal with that in this audit.
5:25 p.m.
Red Deer—Lacombe, CPC
That's all I have, Mr. Chair.
I'll turn it back over to my colleagues here.
5:25 p.m.
Mr. Ken McDonald (Avalon, Lib.)
Thank you very much, everyone.
A special thank you, of course, to Ms. Gelfand and Ms. Da Costa for attending this session. We much appreciate it, and I'm sure we'll be inviting you back again in the not-too-distant future.
I'll ask the clerk to email the schedule for next week because there are a couple of additional meetings coming up.
The meeting is adjourned.