Fisheries Committee on April 29th, 2019

[Gail Wallin]

Absolutely. There's an absolute need to have more resources dedicated to protect our waters, and not just specific rivers. With regard to the point about there being authority, there probably needs to be stronger leadership at both the federal and provincial-territorial levels so that the lists aren't just by species, but close those pathways. You've given some good examples.

Whether we're trying to protect the Fraser or the Skeena for salmon, we don't want boaters moving milfoil. We don't want them moving mussels. We can do a lot by getting our key audiences better educated.

I have a couple of other things. One, just to build on the authority aspect, is with regard to the federal government, and not just DFO. DFO would need to work really closely with Environment and Climate Change Canada and the CFIA on something like a common database. Right now you can't figure out where zebra mussels are or where milfoil is in Canada. There isn't a common database that I, as a citizen, can pick up, access and engage my fishermen friends with to make sure that we protect our waters. It's important to look at that and engage our citizens, absolutely.

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

Okay, thank you.

[Dr. Anna Warwick Sears]

Let me just say that there are some laws in place, of course, at the federal and provincial levels to stop the spread of invasive species, but if people are not enforcing the laws, if they only have part-time or part-year inspection stations, although it's illegal to bring invasive species to B.C., they are still going to spread unless there are officers out there actually stopping people.

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

Thank you.

Mr. MacIsaac, you talked about addressing the vectors. It's like a disease, basically. You need to quarantine to stop them. We've seen that the inspection stations that have been set up in B.C. have definitely stopped infected or infested boats and watercraft from coming in. These are not, however, on every point of entry.

Do you feel that they're sufficient and that they're manned for sufficient hours, and is the training in place to make sure that those inspectors...?

[Gail Wallin]

I feel pretty comfortable answering that question for western Canada. I think there's consensus across governments in western Canada and among the citizens that no, those aren't sufficient. There are many ways that boats could still get through the network into the western provinces.

There needs to be a different approach. You might not, as a federal government, be able to support the 24-7 model, but perhaps boats can only enter at certain times of the day or can only enter through certain ports. Those kinds of provisions are very common for the agriculture sector. You can't ship horses and cattle at whim; there are rules that apply.

We can, then, look to other industries. The bottom line is, keep them in Ontario, keep them in Winnipeg, and then fewer inspections are needed in B.C. or Alberta or wherever.

[Prof. Hugh MacIsaac]

Let me make one point. The auditor said that in many cases we have a blurred distinction about whose responsibility it is. Is it provincial or federal? We have some cases that we can look at, an example being an outbreak of whirling disease in Banff Park a couple of years ago. The reason you need to have the lines clear from the start, as well as budgets in place, is that when you get a call....

That is the most tragic example. If we could turn back the clock five or seven years and say that we don't have the disease here—and it's a devastating disease—and if we had clear lines of authority and found a single occurrence of this thing, what would you do? I can tell you that the most prominent conservation biologist in the world, in my opinion, a guy named Dan Simberloff, says that to him it's very clear what you do: You take whatever tools you have in your tool box and you get out there and address it now, because if you don't address it now, you won't have an opportunity in the future.

If that means poisoning a lake, particularly a small lake.... No one wants to poison a lake—that's not why we're in the business—but you have to look at relative harm, and you say, if we can stop this invasion of a highly deleterious organism in this system, we can keep it out of not only western Canada but out of Canada—certainly out of western Canada.

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

I think I'm out of time.

[The Chair, Liberal, Ken McDonald]

Yes, you definitely are. Thank you, Mr. Arnold.

Now we go to Mr. Johns, for seven minutes or less, please.

[Gord Johns, NDP, Courtenay—Alberni, BC]

Thank you, all, for your testimony. It's incredibly valuable.

I'll start with Ms. Anna Warwick Sears.

You talked about funding earlier. Can you give me the percentage breakdown of what you get from DFO and what you get from other agencies and local and provincial sources? Is there a rough idea?

[Dr. Anna Warwick Sears]

Yes. We get “this much” from any other level of government.

[Gord Johns, NDP, Courtenay—Alberni, BC]

So it's zero from Ottawa?

[Dr. Anna Warwick Sears]

It's zero from Ottawa, zero from the province. All of our funding is from the local property tax base.

[Gord Johns, NDP, Courtenay—Alberni, BC]

I'm from Vancouver Island. I was just in the House of Commons raising concerns about getting money out the door to help local community groups that are there on standby wanting to contribute to help with restoration enhancement and habitat protection projects.

Can you talk about how much the funding is leveraged at the community level, when you get money from Ottawa?

[Dr. Anna Warwick Sears]

Well, I can't talk about it for invasive species, but I can certainly talk about it for a lot of other projects we're working on. For one of the other biggest projects we get, we get some external project-based grant funding from senior governments for things such as flood mapping, and we've been able to leverage federal dollars through the national disaster mitigation program to get the entire valley flood mapped. That will end up being about 40% of the cost.

[Gord Johns, NDP, Courtenay—Alberni, BC]

Right.

Can you go into a bit more detail about collaborating with officials in Washington state to protect vital species like our sockeye, and the importance of that?

[Dr. Anna Warwick Sears]

Yes. There's some really inspiring work that's going on.

One of my other hats is that I'm on the IJC's International Osoyoos Lake Board of Control, and we're working on managing the waters coming out of the Okanagan into Washington state. One of the things we manage them for is specifically to ensure there is enough water in the Okanagan River going into Washington state to support the returning sockeye.

We don't have a federal obligation to provide water to the United States, but everyone—the tribes in Washington state, the first nations in the Okanagan, the settlers in Washington state and the settler communities in B.C.—is completely supportive of the restoration of the sockeye. A lot of the funding for doing the sockeye restoration comes from the hydro systems in the United States, which are doing it as a way to support their obligations under the Endangered Species Act.

We have big restoration programs happening in the Okanagan that are supported by the Americans, because they see us as a way to support.... Because of the pristineness of our system, because we don't have zebra mussels yet, we are able to be the natal streams for the sockeye restoration. They're also bringing back chinook and steelhead.

[Gord Johns, NDP, Courtenay—Alberni, BC]

We know how much they're under threat now, and the salmon certainly don't know borders. They're important to both sides.

Would you be able to work more effectively with them if you were given more resources? How would that help you, to be given resources from Ottawa, say, toward more collaboration?

[Dr. Anna Warwick Sears]

There is so much work that needs to be done on stream restoration in the Okanagan. Most of those ocean-going salmon are river or stream spawners, and there is a lot work that needs to be done to bring those streams back and to improve the habitat. A lot of our habitat was channelized.

[Gord Johns, NDP, Courtenay—Alberni, BC]

Do you work closely with an aquatic invasive species program officer in the region? How many are there in the region?

[Dr. Anna Warwick Sears]

In the Okanagan, the Okanagan and Similkameen Invasive Species Society is the group that's on the ground. We provide a good chunk of their funding. They have a few different funding sources, including the Habitat Conservation Trust Foundation.

We have them under contract for $30,000 a year to do monitoring and outreach at the boat launches. That's part of the funding that we spend every year. That is local property tax funding, because this local invasive species society didn't have enough money to fund people to go out to the boat launches and talk to people. They literally didn't have enough funds, so we had to work out this arrangement and dig into our own budget because there wasn't enough support.

[Gord Johns, NDP, Courtenay—Alberni, BC]

Salmon is a billion-dollar industry in British Columbia so that's pretty scary.

Mr. MacIsaac, can you speak a bit more about how DFO used the work of the Great Lakes Institute for Environmental Research and your work to better address invasive species in the region? You talked a bit about that. You talked about the need for funding. You outlined some of the costs related to it.

How much do you need? You also cited some good models, like Australia and some other places that are doing great work. What are the needs? What would be adequate?

[Prof. Hugh MacIsaac]

Well, not only with aquatics, but with our forestry sector and agricultural pests, you want to keep those things out as well. There are innovative ways to test to see whether or not we have problems. We do a lot of work with environmental DNA. As an organism swims through the water, it ends up excreting and some of its DNA gets left behind.

We have found it very cost-effective to be able to collect water samples. Once you have a DNA, a particular gene that you're targeting which is specific for that species, you just collect water samples and analyze that water for environmental DNA. In an ideal world, you can do this for a whole ensemble of invaders, all using different genes. Then you can map that onto what we call a gene chip, and using a single gene chip, you could simultaneously check your water for the presence of maybe 30 or 50 invaders all at once.

Now, there are going to be significant start-up costs to do that, but once that's been done, the costs drop to very, very low amounts per sample—perhaps $20 or $30 per sample. You can do screening of DNA, which is about four orders of magnitude more sensitive than using traditional methods, where we go out with a net, and you hope that if you have an invasive fish, like the fish we had in British Columbia a few years ago, it makes its presence known by swimming into your net or into a camera field or something like that.

[Gord Johns, NDP, Courtenay—Alberni, BC]

There must be countries investing in this kind of infrastructure because they understand the threat to their economy. Can you name a couple?

[Prof. Hugh MacIsaac]

Australia and New Zealand, Australia, in particular.

[The Chair, Liberal, Ken McDonald]

Thank you, Mr. Johns. You're over time.

We go back now to the government side.

Mr. Morrissey, for seven minutes or less.