First, for clarification, I am Greg Roach, but I am not with DFO. I was the chair of the minister's advisory committee.
I'm very pleased to see that the standing committee is paying attention and putting some focus on wild Atlantic salmon. It's certainly needed. I will give an overview of the minister's advisory committee on Atlantic salmon, the processes it involved, and the recommendations that it made.
I'll give a little background. As I'm sure you are well aware, the salmon resource has been declining for some time. There have been a lot of pressures on it, starting with early fisheries and early disruptions to the environment and the habitat, followed by the damming of rivers through hydro dams and mill dams. Then recently, into the 1980s, there were acid rain problems, and then in more recent times we saw extreme declines in some of our major rivers, including the Miramichi. In fact, in 2014 only 30% of the rivers that were measured met the spawning escapement, and the Miramichi was particularly hard hit, so Minister Shea announced the establishment of the ministerial advisory committee on Atlantic salmon, which I will report on today.
The committee had a chair and a vice-chair, plus nine members. There were two members from Nova Scotia, two from Newfoundland and Labrador, two from New Brunswick, one from P.E.I., and two from Quebec.
The members had vast experience in wild Atlantic salmon. Some of them had spent their entire careers working in that field, and others were involved through volunteer organizations or were active members in stewardship initiatives. The committee in its own right had a lot of expertise, but even with that, we were instructed to get input from external sources: stakeholders, partners in the different areas, plus other science and resource expertise.
We held consultation sessions in Halifax, Moncton, and St. John's, with video links to Goose Bay in Labrador and to Quebec City. In each of those areas we also heard from specific expert groups, DFO scientists, non-governmental organization scientists, university scientists, and other organizations that had professional expertise that they could provide to the committee. We wanted to hear from anyone who had expertise and insight into what was going on with the wild Atlantic salmon and some of the things that might be done to improve wild Atlantic salmon.
While it was quite wide open, we had a very specific mandate. We were told we had to target areas that included conservation. In conservation, we talked about habitat improvement, fishing mortality, stock enhancement, and aquaculture.
Enforcement was another mandate. We were to look at deterrence through enforcement and compliance and also through education and information exchange.
The next area of our mandate was predation. The key species that we looked at here included grey seals, striped bass, sea birds, and smallmouth bass. We also spoke about science, and in this area we looked at knowledge gaps, particularly focusing on stock assessment, data collection, partnerships with other scientific organizations, ocean tracking and ocean issues, water quality, and aquaculture interactions.
We put some focus on national fisheries, specifically with the Greenland fisheries and also the Saint Pierre and Miquelon fishery. We had a catch-all area we called “other considerations”.
As we started through the consultations, many very good ideas were put before the committee, so we decided to include the category of “other” to capture some of these that we thought were pertinent to the things that needed to be done for wild Atlantic salmon.
To quickly go through the recommendations, the committee made 61. That's a lot. We tried to prioritize them, but there was consensus on all these recommendations and a desire to make sure they were recorded, so we put forward all the recommendations. We kept the recommendations under the mandate areas—for example, conservation. I'm sure you folks have the report from the ministerial fisheries advisory committee, so I'll highlight them.
The big one for conservation is additional investment in habitat and science. Habitat improvement was a major one. We believe that a lot of activities in the open ocean may be difficult at this time to address, with the exception maybe of fish mortality, mainly because we don't know a lot of this information, but we do know some of the impacts on the habitat in the coastal river areas, so we can make some significant differences by working there.
We looked at collaboration with the provinces to address habitat issues through existing regulations and existing land use practices. We talked about recommendations using the scientific approach—what they call the precautionary approach—for the harvest in the recreational fishery. We looked at recommendations to reduce the mortality from net fisheries by non-first nations fisheries. There are still a number of fisheries taking place in which there is a bycatch of Atlantic salmon, and we wanted to have that issue addressed.
We put forward a number of recommendations for first nations fisheries. We recognized the rights for food, social, and ceremonial fisheries, but put forward some recommendations to address possible take-out periods for some of the nets, net camping as an important concept, the positioning of the nets to put them close to the mouths of the rivers so that they wouldn't intercept fish that were destined for other rivers as they were transiting through an area, and also perhaps the use of fish traps instead of nets so that they could select the species or the size of the fish and also keep the fish alive before they're harvested.
We also talked about some collaboration on regulatory issues to work towards best land use practices and regulations for aquaculture.
Enforcement is pretty straightforward. We suggested there should be increased enforcement capacity and increased partnerships to make the enforcement more efficient. We also talked about education programs to get information out to the general public.
On predation, in relation to grey seals and striped bass we talked about increasing the research to figure out what the impacts were and also about increasing the harvest through, perhaps, some fisheries for grey seals, perhaps with first nations. Also we talked about increasing the recreational fishery and first nation fisheries for striped bass, in addition to doing the research.
In the case of seabirds, we focused on looking at the impact, so more research would be needed there.
Finally, concerning smallmouth bass, particularly in the Miramichi region, there's a population in Miramichi Lake that is of concern, so we recommended some steps on that front.
In the science recommendations we talked about improving data collection, improving collaboration among the different scientific groups, and improving the stock assessments. There are a number of rivers that are assessed every year. In the case of some, it's not clear whether the funding would even be continued, so we talked about shoring up the funding for existing rivers and adding some additional rivers.
There are many partners that can help with the science, and DFO doesn't have to be the lead on all partnerships, so we strongly recommended increasing partnerships for data collection in the river systems and moving forward on that front.
On the international fisheries, we put interim recommendations forward to basically work with international parties—with Denmark and Greenland, particularly, for the Greenland fisheries, along with NASCO, and with France and Saint Pierre and Miquelon to have a look at that fishery. It's somewhat concerning to have a commercial fishery intercepting salmon destined for Canadian rivers off Saint Pierre and Miquelon when the fisheries are closed in other areas where those fish are heading.
There are a number of other recommendations as well, the key one being the review of the wild Atlantic salmon policy. There are many recommendations and components in it that are touched by the recommendations we made.
The bottom line is that we have a number of partnerships and a number of players who are ready to work in this area, but there is a need for additional investment and some more initiatives from DFO.
Wild salmon is a very valued resource in Atlantic Canada. We need new investment to address the concerns, so we proposed the establishment of a wild salmon research and innovation fund. It would support science. It would support habitat improvements and other initiatives. It would leverage other programs and utilize our research partners and volunteer partners who are out there.
To help coordinate this work, we also recommended the establishment of an Atlantic salmon scientific research and development group. That group would basically coordinate the science and share data and information.
The research fund being proposed, then, would be a 10-year program, with an arm's-length group to act as oversight to ensure that the resources were used for the priority areas.
That's the summary. Thank you very much.