We can certainly try.
Evidence of meeting #114 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 whales.
A recording is available from Parliament.
Evidence of meeting #114 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 whales.
A recording is available from Parliament.
Noon
Conservative
Noon
Conservative
Todd Doherty Conservative Cariboo—Prince George, BC
All right, well, there you go.
Ms. Brown, I have a question regarding the disentanglement teams.
I met with the Newfoundland and Labrador whale release group last week in my office, and I was amazed by the bravery and the commitment involved from groups such as yours and that group, grassroots organizations who are working with industry and going out there to do whatever you can to free the whales. I just want to say thank you for that, as I said to the others. I think it's something that a government, whether it's this government or the future government in 2019, needs to look at investing in so that you can have consistent operations.
That's it.
Noon
Mr. Ken McDonald (Avalon, Lib.)
We're now on to Mr. Donnelly for seven minutes or less, please.
Noon
NDP
Fin Donnelly NDP Port Moody—Coquitlam, BC
Thank you, Mr. Chair.
I'd like to also thank all five of our witnesses for participating in the study today. I appreciate your testimony.
I want to read out one element of the motion that I want to shape my questions around. It is the first bullet, which is to identify steps that could be taken to better protect and help the recovery of right, beluga, and killer whales.
That's one element. There are other elements that were passed in the motion.
I want to turn my questions initially to the Georgia Strait Alliance. It's great work that GSA has done over the decades.
Ms. Wilhelmson, you mentioned that GSA feels that immediate and bold actions are needed. I want to add that I think we've known about the threats to southern resident killer whales for almost 20 years. They have intensified now to the point that your organization joined with a group of others in January of 2018—which you talked to us about—to really put pressure on the government to take bold and immediate action.
I just want to confirm that the number one issue is for the government to issue an emergency order.
12:05 p.m.
Executive Director, Georgia Strait Alliance
You've really alluded to the challenge. Since the species was declared “endangered”, we've known exactly what the problems are. The challenge has been the loss of time and the inability of government processes to move quickly, whether it's legal...policies, consultations or bureaucratic processes, which can serve the public, but in this case have not served the whales.
A year ago, my coalition partners and I started talking about the fact that things were getting worse for these animals. I've alluded to the numbers and the decline in this population, which is an incredibly small number of animals. We've reached a point where we needed action right away. An emergency order is a tool under the Species at Risk Act that allows government, when it knows clearly what needs to be done and when the scientists are agreeing on the path forward, to cut through the bureaucratic delays and actually make changes today.
If the government had decided in February of this year, after looking at our letter, it could have done a series of things—which I already mentioned—immediately. We could have had new critical habitat. We could have decreased noise in the Salish Sea. We could have slowed down...all sorts of things.
Yes, the emergency order is the tool by which so much can be done. That is what we put before the government in January of this year. The difference is that there have been many announcements of what the government has wanted to do, and, as a scientist, I think investing in research and monitoring is critical. I'm not opposed to that. However, today it makes no difference for the whales.
In essence, in 2003 the species was declared endangered, and the health of their habitat has only declined in that time. Nothing has changed for the good of these animals in 15 years, and we are running out of time. The emergency order is a powerful tool.
12:05 p.m.
NDP
Fin Donnelly NDP Port Moody—Coquitlam, BC
Thank you for that.
You gave us seven actions. Were they in order of priority? If they weren't, could you submit to the committee the order of priority of those actions, i.e., one through seven? That would be helpful. That's just a directive or a suggestion.
Also, one of the things you talked about was a noisier ocean. The government is also looking at increasing tanker traffic in the Salish Sea. If the Trans Mountain project goes through, we would see an increase of oil tanker traffic in that area.
The government is also looking at marine protected areas. The final report for the national advisory panel on marine protected area standards came out in September. One of the protections they talk about is prohibiting industrial activities such as “oil and gas exploration and exploitation, mining, dumping, and bottom trawling”. That's in this report. I'm not sure if you have had a chance to read that one.
My question is really more about MPAs and whale habitat. It seems that three specific suggestions have been made about food, noise and pollutants. What about critical whale habitat in MPAs? Is there a role they can play?
12:05 p.m.
Executive Director, Georgia Strait Alliance
There are different tools under marine planning initiatives, and absolutely, there is the ability, if it's a national marine conservation area or another tool, to put in management recommendations and management rules to limit activities that will cause harm to critical habitats.
In the Strait of Georgia, which in Canada includes the critical habitat of the orca, no comprehensive marine planning is occurring. It's the only place in coastal British Columbia that has no comprehensive marine planning. I think it's a real gap in the way we're going about managing critical habitat, because it has the ability in a more holistic way to put in place a variety of different actions that could make the habitat more protected. National marine conservation in particular could be very powerful, because it brings together indigenous leadership as well as our government's leadership and management tools.
I want to make one point clear. For those who don't live in this part of the country, the Salish Sea is one of the noisiest parts of coastal British Columbia. The port of Vancouver is Canada's largest port. All the actions I mentioned have to do with threats that exist currently. Never mind projects that, as you mentioned, are being proposed that will make the Salish Sea noisier and will put at risk more possibilities of pollutants if an oil spill should occur; right now we're not even handling the threats to the orcas from the current commercial activities in the region. I think marine planning, among others, is a powerful tool, but we have to get ahead of the game and start taking some immediate actions.
To your point about the list, my list was not in order of importance, and I will follow up with that order afterwards.
12:10 p.m.
NDP
Fin Donnelly NDP Port Moody—Coquitlam, BC
I think I'm out of time. Thank you very much.
I did have one last question for Dr. Barrett-Lennard on rebuilding chinook stocks, but if there is another round I'll ask at that point.
12:10 p.m.
Mr. Ken McDonald (Avalon, Lib.)
Thank you, Mr. Donnelly.
We'll move back to the government side. Mr. Hardie, you have seven minutes or less, please.
12:10 p.m.
Liberal
Ken Hardie Liberal Fleetwood—Port Kells, BC
Let's let Mr. Barrett-Lennard speak to his thoughts on rebuilding chinook stocks.
12:10 p.m.
Director, Marine Mammal Research Program, Coastal Ocean Research Institute
As I said in my introduction, I feel that we have to look at both short-term and longer-term solutions. In talking about rebuilding stocks, we're talking about those longer-term solutions.
As Christianne mentioned, we have huge issues right now that create a great sense of urgency—
12:10 p.m.
Liberal
Ken Hardie Liberal Fleetwood—Port Kells, BC
I'll ask you to be relatively brief, because I do have a number of other questions.
12:10 p.m.
Director, Marine Mammal Research Program, Coastal Ocean Research Institute
I think both governments have put a great deal of effort and money into rebuilding chinook stocks. It's clear it's a very slow, long-term process. Early life history survival of chinook, once they get out of the rivers and into the ocean, is a critical period. Maintaining the quality and the complexity of near-shore and estuarine habitats is one way that's not being sufficiently addressed so far to help those stocks rebuild.
12:10 p.m.
Liberal
Ken Hardie Liberal Fleetwood—Port Kells, BC
I noticed a couple of online videos lately, one of orcas surf-riding behind a boat, and another of an orca apparently playing with a boat in Tofino Harbour. Are there dangers involved? Are these whales becoming habituated to humans at their own peril?
12:10 p.m.
Director, Marine Mammal Research Program, Coastal Ocean Research Institute
Yes. This certainly happens. The whales are smart animals and humans are smart animals who do lots of things—particularly young humans who imperil themselves—and approaching boats, or coming into proximity of boats, is certainly a risk. As I mentioned, we're seeing substantial evidence of propeller strike wounds on whales, particularly in the northern resident community.
This is another reason, I think, that enforcement of new government regulations on marine mammal regs on approach distances to boats is so important. Keeping the boats well back from the whales so they don't become acclimated and don't learn to play with them is key.
12:10 p.m.
Liberal
Ken Hardie Liberal Fleetwood—Port Kells, BC
Mr. Bain, do we have any research that shows the impact of what has been described as an exploding population of sea lions and seals? I think you referenced that yourself. Do they compete directly with the southern residents for the chinook and chum?
12:10 p.m.
Chief Scientist, Orca Conservancy
Yes, they do compete directly, but they also prey on predators of those salmon. They'll eat hake and they'll also eat salmon, so it's not clear what the overall balance would be.
We do have places like the Ballard Locks in Seattle where the pinnipeds find the salmon a lot faster than the salmon find the fish ladder, and they were able to decimate the run there. There are seals that will park at river mouths and eat smolts that are going out to sea. That's encouraged to some degree by humans, because we'll do hatchery releases that bring large numbers of smolts into a small area at the same time. We've also channelized rivers so there's a single opening instead of a wide delta.
12:15 p.m.
Liberal
Ken Hardie Liberal Fleetwood—Port Kells, BC
I guess the question then becomes whether the time has come for us to consider managing the population of sea lions and seals, or as you suggested earlier, let the transients take care of it in due course.
12:15 p.m.
Chief Scientist, Orca Conservancy
I think we can let the transients take care of it. I guess the problem from the residents' perspective is that the seal populations were able to grow about 10% a year once they were protected, and killer whale populations only grow about 3% a year, so the seal populations exploded and the transients are slowly catching up.
The nature of transient behaviour is to look for concentrations of pinnipeds, so if the pinnipeds are trying to take advantage of fish coming out of a river mouth, that'll draw transients, which will disperse the seals and eliminate the problem.
Seals are also important for vertical nutrient cycling; they'll take nutrients in depth and bring them up to the surface where they can go back into primary productivity.
12:15 p.m.
Liberal
Ken Hardie Liberal Fleetwood—Port Kells, BC
Okay, sir. I appreciate that. Thank you.
Ms. Wilhelmson, there was a wonderful story a while back about the impact of reintroducing wolves into Yellowstone Park. From your comments, I take it we may be looking at that wonderful story in reverse. What happens if we lose the southern resident killer whales?
12:15 p.m.
Executive Director, Georgia Strait Alliance
To be honest, it's hard to imagine. You take the species that has all sorts of impact and you just look at what happens if all its interactions with other species....
I just want to allude a little bit to the previous question, in the sense that we don't know. It's like a ball of yarn. You actually don't know all the interactions of a species or its impacts on an ecosystem sometimes until you try playing around with it, whether by having a species go extinct or by actively removing a marine mammal through culling. It's not something that we support, because you absolutely have no idea how it's going to impact the ecosystem. You could put a dozen scientists in a room who would come up with different scenarios for the impacts of removing an apex predator, but the reality is that it would change the ecosystem completely.
What species would come in to replace the southern resident killer whale if it weren't there? At the end of the day, it's not something we want to imagine. It's not something we want to spend a lot of time talking about. We want to spend more time talking about the immediate actions we need to take today to ensure that we don't have to tell our grandchildren what southern resident killer whales used to do and how they looked.
12:15 p.m.
Mr. Ken McDonald (Avalon, Lib.)
Thank you, Mr. Hardie.
We'll now go back to the Conservative side and Mr. Calkins. You have five minutes.