Fisheries Committee on April 29th, 2019

[Blaine Calkins, Conservative, Red Deer—Lacombe, AB]

To anybody who wishes to answer the question or address this, is any country or any region of the world using a particular model to control, prevent or destroy aquatic invasive species that we have examined thoroughly and could be gaining information and knowhow from, but we are currently not?

[Prof. Hugh MacIsaac]

I mentioned hull fouling. That's the next principal vector that I would be focusing on: hull fouling and the live trades. I think the best case study would be hull fouling in Australia.

[Dr. Anna Warwick Sears]

I would like to add to that. I think the key here is that eradication is almost impossible in most cases, once an invasive species gets established. There are some exceptions. If you have a lake that is very well defined, you can add rotenone to it and you can eradicate things on a small scale. But if something is persistent on a geographic scale, you can't get rid of it. You just have to figure out how to manage it.

This is why we're coming here and pleading with this committee to really help us with prevention, because prevention is going to be cheaper. Prevention is low tech. Prevention is a matter of working with the existing regulatory systems, working with conservation officers or what have you. That's what is going to be the real key here, rather than trying to come in and find a miracle cure because there's probably not going to be one.

[The Chair, Liberal, Ken McDonald]

Mr. Bouzan has his hand up.

[Blaine Calkins, Conservative, Red Deer—Lacombe, AB]

Go ahead, Mr. Bouzan.

[Andrew Bouzan]

Prevention, of course, is the essential component of what everyone here wants to see in any freshwater marine environment and ecosystem, but it's the response that's there as well. As I highlighted previously on the green crab issue in Placentia Bay and St. George's Bay here in Newfoundland, it took over a year for DFO to put together anything to assess and evaluate what happened and then try to put a plan in place. Quite frankly, a year is an awfully long time to evaluate, assess and put anything in place.

Obviously, assessments and evaluations of coastal environments and ecosystems should be a priority everywhere across the country. When these invasive species are found, there needs to be a much more effective and efficient way to address them fast to ensure that, whatever ecosystems they are found in, they are not going to spread, and hopefully they will be eradicated before they cause serious and detrimental harm to all wildlife and the ecosystem.

[The Chair, Liberal, Ken McDonald]

Go ahead, Jodi.

[Jodi Romyn]

I wanted to further that point. Certainly prevention has always been our major focus. I think a lot of excellent work has been done by provinces and territories across Canada, and a lot of the regional, local groups and indigenous communities that we work with.

In some cases, the plans are there and what's required is the funding to help make them happen. I really think there's also a lot of opportunity for the federal government to work more closely with the provincial governments. Make sure that there are clear mandates and make sure that we do have the ability to respond and work within whatever partnerships we have established within our provinces.

I think there is a lot of opportunity for us provincially and within the territories to really leverage federal funding and see a greater impact on the ground. It is just a matter of having some seed money that we can use to help try to grow and really enact our plan.

[Blaine Calkins, Conservative, Red Deer—Lacombe, AB]

I have another question, and it's a bit philosophical. What I'm hearing from you folks is that the logical and common sense approach is to make sure that we utilize the best practices that we already know about for prevention, which I think is what we're trying to do, and to make sure that we have the funding available in order to implement those best practices with regard to prevention. I suppose it's a bit of a philosophical conundrum that something that will play out for years and decades to come is whether or not we can stabilize the effects of climate change.

Given the fact that the world is changing, which would infer that the natural ranges of species would also change, how will we differentiate in terms of what is invasive? Right now, some people would say that an invasive species is a species that is moving into a geographic range that it didn't once occupy, although because of certain conditions changing, it is now part of the natural range. How much effort should we place on differentiating between species that are undergoing a natural extension or change to their natural geographic range and those that are truly invasive and wouldn't otherwise be there, other than because of some man-made type of vector transmitting them there? Is that a conversation we need to have?

[Dr. Anna Warwick Sears]

I'd like to jump in on that. I think the important thing here—I'm sure you can ask my friend the professor here about his technical terminology—is triage. You're looking at what will have the largest impact on your environment. In the west it might be cheatgrass, which increases the risk of fires on rangeland. It might be Scotch broom, which also chokes out a lot of other plants and increases the risk of fires. It might be invasive mussels that have a huge ecosystem impact.

Certain species are like the dirty dozen, or the dirty 50, or something like that, that are just known, when they come in, to have a huge impact. In the yard next to my house, there is a tree that is an invasive species in Arizona. I just moved into that house. I laughed, because I know that millions of dollars are spent eradicating it in Arizona, but it is not invasive in Kelowna. You really have to use your intelligence, use the tools you have and do the risk assessments. Some are bad and some aren't.

[The Chair, Liberal, Ken McDonald]

Thank you.

Mr. Calkins, you just had a seven-minute session instead of five.

We'll go back to the government side.

Mr. Fraser, you have five minutes or less, please.

[Colin Fraser, Liberal, West Nova, NS]

Thanks so much, Mr. Chair.

Ms. Sparks, you talked about the Asian carp program being a useful model, one that incorporated discussions amongst a number of jurisdictions around the Great Lakes. Can you tell me what's going on right now with regard to Asian carp in the Great Lakes? Is that invasive species issue considered to be under control? I'm aware of a possibility that Asian carp could be sent out east to the Atlantic coast to be used as lobster bait in traps. I'm wondering if you have any comment on that, if you're aware of it.

[Deborah Sparks]

We can speak a bit to the Asian carp in the Great Lakes situation. I'll look to colleagues in the room to speak to the east coast situation, because I'm not aware of that.

I'm really happy that my colleague just came back into the room, because she is our project coordinator on the Asian carp project.

We're looking for an update on what's going on in the Great Lakes with the Asian carp, please.

[Rebecca Schroeder]

I'm sorry; I had to step out. I have a bit of a cold.

Right now DFO is working very heavily with a lot of state agencies. We're on a bunch of different committees with a binational focus because it is a shared resource; the Great Lakes are in Canada and the United States.

DFO is working with a number of partners on their first pillar. The four pillars in their program are prevention, early warning, response and management. On their first pillar, they work with a lot of partner organizations to conduct education and outreach. We're one of them. On the early warning front, they do a lot of monitoring in the spring and summer months. They check areas that they've identified through risk assessments to be hot spots for potential tributaries or breeding grounds for Asian carps. They very recently completed an incident command structure, which you might have read about in the auditor's report, where they looked to a professional agency to help them come up with a response if they were to find Asian carps in the Great Lakes.

I'm happy to say that we are not considering Asian carps to be established in the Great Lakes, or not on the Canadian side, anyway. Grass carp are reproducing in the tributaries of Lake Erie on the United States side. Ohio will be initializing a response, hopefully this summer, to do some eradication.

I hope that was a good overview.

[Colin Fraser, Liberal, West Nova, NS]

Yes, that's very helpful. Thanks very much. Perhaps I'll turn to Dr. MacIsaac, then, to answer the second part of the question.

My understanding is that there's an examination of whether or not Asian carp could be used as bait in the lobster fishery on the Atlantic coast. I know there's some discussion about that. I'm assuming the fish would be killed and then brought out and used as bait in that fishery and in the United States as well. First of all, do you know about that plan?

[Prof. Hugh MacIsaac]

Yes, just from a newspaper report.

[Colin Fraser, Liberal, West Nova, NS]

Do you have any thoughts about any issues that it may raise or that we should be aware of?

[Prof. Hugh MacIsaac]

You want to make sure that the fish are not contaminated excessively with any type of organic compounds, but if the flesh is safe in terms of contaminants and if you can demonstrate that you're not going to be transmitting parasites or something like that to a new area, you may be able to process that.

I know that some of the other carp from the Mississippi drainage is collected and sold in Asia, so make lemonade out of lemons, but again, make sure you go into it knowing what you're doing and whether or not there's any risk associated with transferring other pathogens to the east coast.

[Colin Fraser, Liberal, West Nova, NS]

It could be a useful way to dispose of these invasive species.

[Prof. Hugh MacIsaac]

I think it could, yes. Sure. There's a lot of biomass there.

Yes. I would look at it for sure.

[Colin Fraser, Liberal, West Nova, NS]

Great. Thanks very much.

I'd like to turn to you, Ms. Warwick Sears. Earlier today, I was speaking to a colleague of mine, Stephen Fuhr, who is the MP for your area. He told me about the water milfoil control activities that are going on and the concern around it being in conflict, I guess, with protecting the native mussel species there.

I'm wondering if you can tell us at what stage that SARA listing is as far as DFO is concerned. What effort has your organization in particular made in order to try to bring this problem to the department's attention?

[Dr. Anna Warwick Sears]

Thank you for asking that question.

I'm not an expert in endangered species listings, but my understanding of it is that the proposal to list this was published in the Gazette and there was a one-month public comment period. We had one month to do our legislative review and respond. I think the deadline was April 22. There was not time for us to do the legislative review and then communicate with our community and local government partners and get their feedback to the minister.

What we've done is we've sent in a very detailed letter explaining all of the issues and why we did not feel there had been (a) enough public consultation or (b) even enough research. There had been research papers done in 2015 that weren't even considered and were showing that there were many more of these native mussels in the system. We've sent out a lot of communication to the local governments, the chambers of commerce, the yacht clubs, boating associations and different public entities, and we've asked them to write letters directly to the minister talking about how the listing would impact them.

We support the continuance of this northern range of the Rocky Mountain ridged mussel in our valley, but we feel that if we are rototilling a small fraction of the lakeshore, we are not going to be severely impacting the mussel. We also feel that the public benefit of controlling the invasive species really needs to be balanced with the moral question of protecting the endangered species.

[Colin Fraser, Liberal, West Nova, NS]

That's helpful. Thank you for your good work.

Those are my questions.

[The Chair, Liberal, Ken McDonald]

Thank you. You were a bit over your time.

We'll finish up now with Mr. Johns for three minutes or less, please.

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

I'll be really quick here.

Mr. MacIsaac, you talked about Australia and New Zealand. On numbers, what kind of money are they putting into that? Do you know?