Fisheries Committee on Sept. 29th, 2016

[The Chair, Liberal, Scott Simms]

Thank you, Mr. Carr, that was quite good.

If you don't get all of what you wanted to do in the presentation, you can work it into the questions and answers that follow.

From the Eel Ground First Nation, now that the two of you are here, I'll let you use your time accordingly for your 10 minutes.

Chief Ginnish.

[Chief George Ginnish, Chief, Eel Ground First Nation]

I have a statement, and we'll see how much time is left once we go through that. I'll try to be brief.

My name is George Ginnish. I'm the Chief of the Natoaganeg, or the Eel Ground First Nation.

I welcome you here today to the unceded territory of the Mi'kmaq and to our district, the seventh district of the Mi'gmaq Gespe'gewa'gi.

Natoaganeg is located on the Miramichi River in northern New Brunswick, close to the junction of the Northwest Miramichi River and Southwest Miramichi River. We're about five minutes from here. Our community has reserves on three branches of the Miramichi.

I've served as chief of my community for 20 years, and for a few years on council, before that.

I'm also co-chair the Mi’gmawe’l Tplu’taqnn. Its members are the nine Mi'kmaq communities located in what is now New Brunswick. We work together to advance and protect Mi'kmaq rights, including our right to fish for food, for social and ceremonial purposes, and commercially.

I'm also the chair of the North Shore Micmac District Council and our AAROM, Anqotum Resource Management, which represents eight of our Mi'kmaq communities on fisheries issues, including building capacity to participate effectively in advisory and decision-making processes used for aquatic resource and oceans management.

I'll be speaking today on behalf of all those organizations.

I'm supported today by Devin Ward, who works as a fisheries coordinator with Mi’gmawe’l Tplu’taqnn and is a senior biologist with Anqotum.

We, the Mi'kmaq, are the indigenous people of this territory, and since time immemorial we have occupied our traditional lands known as Mi'kma'ki. Our Mi'kmaq traditional lands and waters are located throughout the provinces of New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, Prince Edward Island, and Newfoundland, and extend into Quebec and Maine.

We have relied on our lands, waters, and resources for our way of life, as they have provided us with food, shelter, and all aspects of our daily lives.

Our relationship with the lands, waters, and resources is the foundation of our identity. As indigenous peoples, we managed our fisheries for thousands of years based on Mi'kmaq principles, and the fish remained abundant.

The Mi'kmaq people have lived throughout the Miramichi River system and relied on it for their physical, spiritual, and cultural sustenance, and their livelihood since time immemorial.

In the 18th century, on a nation-to-nation basis, the Mi'kmaq entered into a series of peace and friendship treaties with the British Crown between 1725 and 1779. These treaties form a covenant chain, and the treaty relationship with the Crown, as represented by the Government of Canada, is ongoing.

We have never surrendered our title to these lands and waters, and our sacred treaties protect our rights to shared stewardship of our resources and to fish throughout our territory, both for food, social, and ceremonial purposes, and to earn our livelihood.

Our communities fish a variety of species in order to meet our needs and to earn a living. Our food fishery is distributed to community members, and a number of our community members rely on the income they earn in our modest commercial fishery.

Five of our Mi'kmaq communities are among the 10 poorest postal codes in all of Canada. Our fishery is very much a matter of physical, cultural, and spiritual survival for our people.

A recent study by the University of Ottawa that was conducted in our community shows that 40% of our Eel Ground First Nation members are food insecure.

While all species are important to our people, Plamu, or salmon, has a particular significance to the Mi'kmaq. Salmon is not only a staple of our diet, but is intimately tied to our cultural and spiritual practices. Our ability to fish salmon for food is essential to feeding our most vulnerable families, children, and elders. The fate of the Atlantic salmon is of utmost importance to us.

After thousands of years of sustainable management by the Mi'kmaq, many of the species we rely on, including the Atlantic salmon, have been driven to the verge of extinction in less than 150 years.

Miramichi is one of the last great salmon rivers in New Brunswick. Despite significant conservation efforts, our salmon population is under significant pressure, with record low returns in recent years.

Our community has been reduced to a small, food, social, and ceremonial fishery, which we are under constant pressure to suspend entirely.

Survival of the salmon smolts migrating out of the Miramichi river system is estimated to be 50% or less. This means that only half of the young ready to migrate to sea to become adults ever make it to the ocean.

The species experiences pressure from forestry, from climate change, from predations, and from other species, such as striped bass and seal.

Salmon is a cold water species. High temperatures have resulted in the closure of several salmon pools this past summer. The government continues to allow industrial and resource development activities in our watersheds and oceans, which threaten the salmon, such as offshore oil, subsea cables, the Sisson Brook mine and the energy east TransCanada pipeline.

The Supreme Court of Canada has confirmed our rights to fish for food social ceremonies in the Marshall decision in 1999 and to fish commercially to earn a moderate livelihood. The court has also confirmed that only genuine conservation objectives can take priority over first nations fishery, and that first nations fishery must take priority over recreational and commercial fisheries.

Canada has never implemented the Marshall decision, and most of our communities' members are unable to earn a moderate livelihood from our fishery. Our communities remain poor while others get rich.

DFO continually ignores the priorities set out by the Supreme Court of Canada. It does not meaningfully engage the Mi'kmaq in conservation efforts, and we are continually asked to reduce our fishing activities in the name of conservation.

As an example, we continue to face pressure to reduce or eliminate our food, social, and ceremonial fishery for Atlantic salmon for conservation reasons. We are not allowed a commercial fishery, yet the recreational fishery continues without any substantive study of the impact of catch-and-release on salmon mortality and population numbers. This is completely contrary to the priority mandated by the Supreme Court of Canada.

Another example is the impact of seal and striped bass predation on salmon populations. We had asked DFO to open up the aboriginal food fishery and commercial fishery for Mi'kmaq for striped bass and grey seal. As you may be aware, striped bass were put under a moratorium for low numbers five years ago. It was considered recovered should the population consist of approximately 35,000 spawning adults for five consecutive years. They have met and exceeded this number. The latest population estimates that exists for a 20-mile stretch of river that is in our traditional territory now exceeds 300,000 bass.

To date, we've only been allowed a limited food fishery in striped bass, and our requests for a commercial bass fishery or seal fishery have been ignored. At the same time, DFO has opened up a recreational fishery in striped bass. Somehow, the recreational fishery takes priority over aboriginal treaty rights, contrary to the direction of the Supreme Court of Canada.

Our communities presented to the minister’s advisory committee on Atlantic salmon in March 2015 through the Assembly of First Nations' Chiefs in New Brunswick at North Shore on quota. We provided a copy of the assembly's submission to that committee along with my speaking notes today, and I encourage you to read it. We call for a greater Mi'kmaq role in conservation enforcement measures, and measures to restore the balance between the species in our ecosystem, with a greater role for first nations and indigenous knowledge in advancing science.

The ministerial advisory committee issued its report in August 2015. They adopted some of our suggestions and ignored others. We were told that while the committee itself did not engage in consultation, we would be consulted by DFO on the recommendations that were made, many of which touched on first nations. We requested a meeting with the minister to discuss this report, and to date no consultation or meeting with the minister has taken place.

Similarly, my appearance before this committee today does not discharge the duty to consult with first nations, nor does it meet Canada's treaty obligations. DFO needs to sit down with us in the spirit of the treaty partnership and begin to involve us as true partners in decisions regarding conservation enforcement, management, and allocation. Our indigenous knowledge needs to be respected alongside science. DFO needs to respect the law as set out by the Supreme Court of Canada.

The Mi'kmaq need to be given priority access to the fishery, which can only be limited for genuine conservation reasons. Nothing more or less than our survival depends on it.

Thank you.

[The Chair, Liberal, Scott Simms]

Good timing. Right on

Thank you, Chief Ginnish.

We're going to go now to Mr. Mahendrappa from Maritime Seal Management.

[Suju Mahendrappa, Director, Maritime Seal Management Inc.]

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Thank you, honourable members of the committee.

I really appreciate the chance to present before you today. I'm going to read my prepared remarks and look forward to your questions. I hope there are many of them. I have a lot more to say than I have time allocated for.

I'm going to start by telling you a little about our organization, Maritime Seal Management Inc., MSM. MSM is a federal not-for-profit corporation formed in May 2014. Its objectives include, to implement a series of recommendations to DFO science and the 2012 recommendations of the Senate standing committee regarding grey seals; and to develop and execute a strategy for responsible grey seal population management in the Maritimes that provides biodiversity within our marine ecosystem and promotes fish stock recoveries in the region.

MSM's co-founding directors hold considerable expertise in marine science, management decision-making, private equity investment, investment banking, business strategy, international market development, fish processing including seal processing, and seal harvesting.

Next I want to tell you a little about a proposal that we submitted to the Minister of Fisheries and Oceans in December 2015. MSM partnered with a group of concerned aboriginals in New Brunswick who were organized under the name Aboriginal Conservation and Ecology, which I'm going to refer to as ACE, to jointly propose to the Minister of Fisheries and Oceans a comprehensive and risk-managed approach to resuming the traditional aboriginal harvest of grey seals in the Maritimes and Quebec.

Our proposal carries the following features. It proposes an aboriginal subsistence harvest and not a commercial harvest. Under our plan, a range of finished and semi-finished products would be produced from the harvested seals and marketed in several distinct markets to help recover the harvest, production, and marketing costs, and to ensure adequate capitalization of the program. It proposes that financial surpluses remaining after the program financing and costs are paid would be dedicated entirely to aboriginal social programs, particularly including those related to teen mental health and suicide prevention, youth skills development, and aboriginal nutrition programs.

It proposes targeting the harvest of seals one year of age and older, so no seals younger than one year of age would be harvested. It proposes a value-based utilization of all parts of the harvested seal, so that nothing would go to waste. It proposes that harvest levels be set based on ecological goals and conservation targets, and following a precautionary management approach. It proposes the refinement of harvest methods to help ensure consistency with internationally accepted standards for the humane harvest of animals. Lastly, it proposes to follow an inclusive, open, and transparent approach that would include scientific monitoring by an international panel of independent scientists and/or scientific organizations.

To give you an overview of the people who were involved in our organization and our proposal, there's an exhibit 2, which I've provided to the clerk. I'll just read a paragraph on that.

The proposal combines the contributions of diverse experts with decades of experience in seal products marketing, aboriginal and mainstream fashion design, biochemistry, life sciences, industrial engineering, and international co-branding and market development for premium consumer products. It also proposes to utilize existing processing capacity capable of handling all parts of the harvested seal with only minimal additional capital investment required.

Lastly, I want to give you a few points on a decision analysis level regarding the approval of our proposal, which we hope is forthcoming. I'm going to read out some points.

Our proposal offers the Government of Canada an opportunity to simultaneously achieve some of its stated objectives, such as job creation; the support of more biologically sustainable, bio-diversified, and financially rewarding commercial and recreational fishery sectors; and the strength and well-being and socio-economic development of Canada's aboriginal peoples.

The potential for negative repercussions on the Government of Canada for supporting our proposal arise principally from the risk of poor public understanding of what is being done and why it's being done. This is particularly true regarding populations in large urban centres such as the Toronto region, which are geographically, economically, and culturally distanced from fisheries, and generally from natural environments.

MSM and ACE, together with specialized professional partners and public celebrity figures, have formulated specific and thoroughly reasoned plans for achieving the accurate and broad public understanding of the cultural, social, and ecosystem benefits of our proposed seal harvest, as well as the measures adopted to ensure our clear and consistent adherence to high standards of animal welfare. That's a point that would reduce the risk that is naturally associated with the approval of our proposal.

MSM went to great lengths to understand the inner workings, operational priorities, and sophisticated decision-making processes of organizations that historically have opposed commercial seal harvesting by non-aboriginals, many of which continue to run anti-seal hunt campaigns to assist their own fundraising efforts. MSM's proposed harvest features a series of attributes that negate the major points on which such groups typically base their criticisms of commercial seal harvests. The objectives of saving species at risk from extirpation and promoting biodiversity are consistent with the priorities of such groups' existing supporters.

Based on our analysis of all parties positions and objections, we do not believe that anti-seal harvest groups likely would elect to vocally oppose our proposed harvest and draw resources away from their more legitimate powerful and successful campaigns that are ongoing. They would gain little or no incremental benefits by opposing our proposed harvest, while still bearing the significant risk of alienating supporters or creating fractions among their supporter groups.

If we have a little time left, I'd like to speak to one of the topics that arose earlier on whether seals eat salmon. The example I like to give is that if you're having a party in your backyard, and you lay out 10 trays of smoked haddock and 10 trays of bacon-wrapped scallops, you'll probably find that everybody is going to eat the bacon-wrapped scallops first. Seals are mammals just like we are. They have preferred foods. They prefer oily fish because they're high in energy and high in nutrition. They eat a lot of herring and a lot of mackerel these days because there are more of them, and because everybody has eaten the bacon-wrapped scallops, or in this example everybody has eaten the salmon. If you're a DFO scientist you may look at that backyard barbeque and conclude our guests have modified their behaviour and they no longer like bacon-wrapped scallops, but I believe that you will find if you lay out fresh trays of bacon-wrapped scallops, your guests will change their behaviour back and they'll begin eating what they preferred before. Seals are mammals, and they're no different from that.

That's a point that I appreciate having the time to make. I want to say that we've done a lot of work. We have a tremendous group of people assembled. We've worked on this for years. Some of my colleagues have worked on this since the 1980s. We have a solution that we believe is entirely viable. It's well-reasoned and it's well-researched. We have partners in place in various parts of the world, including across Canada. We have people in many provinces participating in our program.

The decision to move forward with what we're proposing is one that simply requires the courage to do the right thing, because I don't believe that any rational person involved in this discussion of conservation and the protection of species at risk would dispute that actions to restore balance and promote biodiversity are the right thing to do. The challenge is the fear that the public in areas of Canada, which are significant to our country in many respects economically, socially, and democratically, will misinterpret what we're doing. What this takes is the courage on the part of leaders like you who are here today to do the right thing and to help us to do the right thing. I don't want you to feel as leaders that you're going to be left alone to defend what we're proposing to do. We feel that we are responsible just as much as our elected officials and just as much as all Canadians for our actions. We take that very seriously. We have great plans in place to build public awareness to satisfy concerns. We're talking about an inclusive open and transparent process. We would appreciate your support in bringing the topic of our proposal to the cabinet level for discussion, because as the system is set up it's gone likely as far as it can in the DFO bureaucracy. What we need is, and we're counting on, your support to give us a chance to propose this at the cabinet level for approval.

Thank you.

[The Chair, Liberal, Scott Simms]

Thank you, Mr. Mahendrappa. Thank you for your analogy. We're now sufficiently hungry and yearning for bacon-wrapped scallops.

Mr. Aucoin, you have the floor, and have been allocated 10 minutes.

You're from the Nova Scotia Salmon Association.

[Réné Aucoin]

Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.

I'm the only francophone in the association. My presentation will be in English, but

if you have questions,

you can ask them in either official language, and it will be my pleasure to answer.

I'd like to note two things that I did not include in my document. They are comments that were made, or were not responded to. The first was about the concept of catch and release.

I'm also president of the Cheticamp River Salmon Association. I believe that may have been the first catch-and-release river in Canada. It's in a national park, and it was established as a catch-and-release river in 1988. I don't know if there were others at that time. In the 28-year history of catch-and-release, there are no known mortalities from catch-and-release on that particular river.

It's in Cape Breton Highlands National Park, and of course it is a cold-water river, more fished in spring and fall, so that may help, and by experienced anglers. I think under good conditions with the average there would be no mortality in catch-and-release, and I think there would be many studies that show from zero to five, I heard, but in this river there were none in 28 years.

The other one, which I'll just note, was on aquaculture in the Bay of Fundy. No one responded to that here at the time. The reason no one responded is that all of the groups here, except Sonja Wood, are in the Gulf of St. Lawrence. There is no aquaculture in the Gulf of St. Lawrence. The aquaculture is all in the Bay of Fundy, on the Atlantic coast of Nova Scotia, and on the south coast of Newfoundland.

I will not go any further. I do have more comments on that. Hopefully they will come out in the questions.

The Nova Scotia Salmon Association was created in 1963 by prominent members of the N.S. angling community. It's a registered non-profit charitable organization, with 1,100 members or so and 22 directors who come from all parts of the province. It's the leading volunteer organization promoting the wise management and conservation of wild Atlantic salmon stock and trout stock in Nova Scotia with a board of directors representing all parts of Nova Scotia, again. There are about 23 affiliated organizations. The Cheticamp River Salmon Association, of which I am president, is a member of the Nova Scotia Salmon Association. The Nova Scotia Salmon Association in turn is an affiliate of the Atlantic Salmon Federation.

The primary local issues of concern for NSSA are the acid rain impact on Nova Scotia Atlantic coast rivers, in the area we call the southern uplands; open-pen or sea cage aquaculture impact on wild Atlantic salmon, again in the Bay of Fundy and the Atlantic coast; human impact past and present on river and stream fish habitat; and the loss of the inner Bay of Fundy wild salmon from 40,000 a generation ago to a handful today, which you heard very recently. My presentation will just focus on the acid rain mitigation project.

You have a map there. It shows the acid rain impacted areas of Nova Scotia, and this coincides with the geology. There's very poor geology. It's all basically rock in that whole area. How the acid rain works, if you're not too familiar with that, is that when the air currents and the streams from west to east hit the Atlantic coast, they bring in all this acid rain stuff from the industrialized U.S. It then follows up along the Atlantic coast, and basically what you're seeing there is the drift of the air currents hitting that particular area.

The acid rain mitigation project is in West River Sheet Harbour. It is actually a lime doser, and you can see from the picture on the next page that it's the size of a tractor-trailer. It's installed on the West River Sheet Harbour. It's about 30 kilometres upstream and it's dishing out lime on a daily basis and has been doing so for the last 10 years.

In 2005, NSSA initiated an ambitious project to restore one of the rivers damaged by acid rain. The West River was selected for the demonstration project through an extensive review exercise carried out by a committee composed of NSSA, ASF, Trout Nova Scotia, Nova Scotia Power, and both federal and provincial governments. A report was contracted by NSSA and prepared by Dr. Atle Hindar, a leading Norwegian researcher on liming strategies to combat acid rain effects. For the first 10 years of operation, the lime doser was operated solely by volunteers from NSSA.

The cost to 2015, fundraised mostly by NSSA—we have two fundraising events a year, a golf tournament and a dinner—of liming, maintenance, and operation approached $1 million for the first 10 years.

The major objective is as follows.

The West River acid rain mitigation project serves as a demonstration and experimental project. We are concentrating resources within this one watershed in order to find the methods needed for effective acid mitigation.

It may sound relatively simple: you just dump the lime into the water and that will bring the pH high enough. However, what we are finding is that pH is only one of the factors—the main one—but there are some other very important factors. You may have heard of this. The second one is aluminum leaching into the rivers, and that is caused by the lack of buffering soil. The buffering agents are gone from the soil, so aluminum leaching into the rivers from the rains is affecting the gills of the small fish that basically have difficulty in surviving the transition to the ocean. That's another thing that we've found out.

We are also conducting concerted experiments to answer the questions currently limiting liming restoration potential. It can be complicated. The lessons learned on the West River are to be incorporated in a restoration blueprint on how to address the issue of acid rain in the impacted rivers of Nova Scotia and Maine. Northeast Maine does share some of that same geology.

In 2016, we have a new partner, new funding after 10 years. It's been a long time doing this by ourselves. The Province of Nova Scotia, in 2016, granted us $100,000 a year. They gave us $300,000 to hire a scientist to start managing this project. It was kind of “go home or go bust”. Why did it take so long? There was a two-year life cycle that we were trying to accomplish, but because we were doing all this research on a shoestring budget with volunteers, it took a long time.

The province has also helped us. We're now doing some helicopter liming. We started that in that same West River watershed. Again, it's to find out exactly the technique and what we need to do to preserve this one river, so that we can possibly take this knowledge to another area.

DFO also partnered in the building and installation of an adult counting fence. In all these years, we did not have a clue of how many fish were coming back. Finally, with some help from DFO and other partners.... The Atlantic salmon conservation fund was a big player, and I think your program, the recreational fisheries partnership program, was also a player.

Other funders have included the NSLC Adopt a Stream. The Nova Scotia Liquor Corporation provides our Adopt a Stream program $100,000 a year. We will be getting, in a 10-year period, $1 million from them for that specific program. The Atlantic salmon conservation fund, RFPP, and various student projects are how we've been managing this project for 10 years.

Finally, the federal government has become involved, and other than the RFPP.... In fact, last week I signed a substantial grant from ACOA for a second lime doser, which is to be installed on the West River, on the Killag branch. Where we have the original lime doser wasn't where it was supposed to be, but it was the only place where we had access. This Killag branch is the preferred place, and now we have access there. We hope that with these two dosers, we will be able to complete our study within a relatively short number of years.

What is the request from NSSA to the federal government? It is recommended that DFO and other federal agencies, including Environment Canada, get involved directly in NSSA's acid mitigation project, that they invest in infrastructure to facilitate acid rain mitigation, including management and administration. So far, we've seen some funding for some parts, but none of the management administration.

Full-time staff could be hired who would be responsible for the implementation of new projects. Initiatives could be funded that would allow non-profit organizations to contribute to DFO's mandate on fish protection in the face of acid rain.

Thank you very much.

Thank you very much.

[The Chair, Liberal, Scott Simms]

Thank you, Mr. Aucoin.

Now we're going to go to our latest addition. We made some room for the Kingsclear First Nation. We have Ms. Sydney Paul, who is the consultation coordinator and also Mr. Gordon Grey, consultation liaison of the group.

I have both of you here for 10 minutes. Feel free to switch back and forth if you wish in your allotted time, but for 10 minutes, please.

[Sydney Paul, Consultation Coordinator, Kingsclear First Nation, As an Individual]

First of all, I just want to note that any information that I'm quoting I can share with the clerk after the presentation, if you like, because I know that people were sending their presentations in.

My name is Sydney Paul and I'm the consultation coordinator for Kingsclear First Nation. Gordon Grey is also with me; he works in consultation for Kingsclear.

I would like to thank the Standing Committee on Fisheries and Oceans for the invitation and to our Mi’gmag; we are sitting on unceded traditional Mi’gmag territory.

We are here to speak on behalf of the six Maliseet communities in New Brunswick. However, our presentation today is not intended to be a comprehensive list of the Maliseet nation's concerns about wild Atlantic salmon. A full-scale consultation would need to be undertaken to obtain a complete understanding of the Maliseet nation's priorities and concerns. Nothing in our presentation should be able to limit, define, or otherwise constrain the Maliseet from bringing additional information forward. In no way does our presentation prejudice the extent of our traditional resource use of wild Atlantic salmon and/or our treaty and aboriginal rights.

The ability to continue our reciprocal relationship with salmon has existed since time immemorial and has been nearly extinguished in the entire Maliseet territory. Legally we are not allowed to fish salmon in our traditional territory.

I would like to state that we have had little time to prepare for this session, and therefore the information that I will provide in this presentation is not a complete presentation of the issues and concerns of the Maliseet.

We call ourselves the Wolastoqiyik, which means people of the Wolastoq. Translated, it means beautiful river. English speakers know this river as the Saint John River. Our name for ourselves illustrates our deep-seated relationship to the river. We are the people of the beautiful river. Our relationship with the river has guided our language, culture, traditions, and society for thousands of years. The importance of the interwoven relationship between the river, the Atlantic salmon, and our people cannot properly be described in 10 minutes. A lot of education needs to happen about the importance of our culture and section 35 constitutionally protected rights. Our oral traditions teach us of our relationship with Wolastoq territories since time immemorial and also give records of environmental degradation to our river system from contact onward.

In our relationship with the Atlantic salmon and our fight to maintain our traditional way of life in context, I would like to read a passage from historian Jason Hall. This comes from our Maliseet traditional land use study that we're currently undertaking.

In 1840, New Brunswick's Indian agent, Moses Perley, advocated damming the mouth of the mouth of the Tobique River as he believed that destroying the most viable food supply available to the local Maliseet community would force them to become more productive farmers and assimilate them into settler society. Perley's vision of a hydroelectric dam on the Tobique did not come to fruition until 1953. It was preceded by dams on the Aroostook River in 1923 and Grand Falls in 1931. The Tobique dam was also followed by Beechwood in 1958 and the Mactaquac in 1968. The dams had and continue to have large-scale negative effects on our society and culture. They flood our villages, cemeteries, plant resources such as fiddleheads, and areas of cultural importance. They also continued to decimate the Atlantic salmon population in our river system to a point where our members can no longer continue the relationship including language and ceremonies that accompany harvesting activities with salmon in the Saint John.

I would like to read a quote from our traditional land use study that is being completed. This is from one of our members we had interviewed:

They completely destroyed our way of life when they made the dam. We had a natural playground for our community, we had water, we had islands, the fiddleheads that were on those, and we had natural swimming pools and a pump house. On weekends in summertime you could see the families just going there. We had ball games on that reserve. Families would go down and take their kids. I remember seeing our guides, the elder women, they all had their place. Some were flat rods and some using spinners and they'd sit there...

Sorry, this is just direct quotes from what they were saying:

They'd fish maybe until before dark. After the dam, that came to an end. That way of life is gone and the livelihood.

As mentioned in the above quote, the way of life is now gone. I cannot fish salmon in the waters that my ancestors fished, and it is unlikely that I would be able to pass this knowledge along to my children. Dams and industries like forestry are eradicating our aboriginal and treaty rights to fish wild Atlantic salmon.

A resource development project is being proposed within our territory, and we feel that it further degrades the habitat of the salmon. We have hired Canadian Rivers Institute to do a study on salmon because we are so concerned. We hoped that even the chance of negative impacts on the salmon would be enough to stop the resource development project, but that does not seem to be happening.

Your report identifies habitat improvement as one of the most important undertakings to sustain and ultimately improve salmon stocks. Since 2008, the Maliseet Nation Conservation Council has been working with Maliseet communities through the aboriginal fisheries strategy to collect habitat data. This data collection is done through stream enhancement, water quality testing, and culvert surveys. The data enabled our community to establish whether brooks are able to support salmonid populations. Our community members are actively taking part in the stewardship of our territory in hopes that the streams and brooks will become viable salmon habitats.

The Tobique River is now under construction for a fish passageway, which is anticipated to decrease the fish kill of Atlantic salmon and the American eel. The Maliseet appreciate that DFO has pushed to incorporate a downstream passageway at the location, but overall efforts seem minimal at Beechwood and Mactaquac. We were told that fish passages were coming to these locations, but where's the sense of urgency? The Mactaquac dam's fish passage is currently a fish hatchery that trucks Atlantic salmon to the Tobique River.

The Mactaquac dam, which is adjacent to my community of Kingsclear, is now making headlines with NB Power picking among its four options by the end of this year. The Maliseet have told NB Power that we prefer option three, which is the river restoration. A councillor from Kingsclear First Nation, Patrick Polchies, describes removing the dam as the single greatest cultural event for the Maliseet in our memories, which would go a long way toward achieving reconciliation with the Maliseet.

The Maliseet believe the dam removal would greatly improve habitat, which is on the committee's recommendation list. The Maliseet are also concerned that the recreational fishing is an option in your recommendations. Although you note that mortality is low if best practices are used, with Atlantic salmon populations as low as they are, we do not see those as adequate conservation measures. The Sparrow decision basically says that aboriginal peoples of Canada have an inherent right to fish for food, social, and ceremonial purposes. This right supersedes recreational fisheries, and recreational fishing should not be allowed until viable populations return.

In conclusion, the Maliseet are deeply concerned about the status of the wild Atlantic salmon. Our knowledge and relationship to salmon is instrumental to rebuilding the population of our river. We need to be meaningfully involved in the recovery. To date our issues have not been adequately addressed by DFO, and our relationship with DFO is unreliable. The federal government must include first nations in decision-making about Atlantic salmon recovery. We have had a deep cultural connection to the species since time immemorial and our traditional knowledge cannot be understated. We want to work with those people who can help us in gaining back our rights to salmon within our traditional territory.

Woliwon.

[Gordon Grey, Consultation Liaison, Kingsclear First Nation, As an Individual]

I was going to give a quick rundown of the three big industrial projects that are happening on Maliseet territory. Of course, Sydney mentioned the Mactaquac dam options, but I also have the paper from the CRI concerning the Sisson mine and its effect on salmon in the Nashwaak River, and there's also energy east.

If you have any questions regarding those things or our stance on them, then feel free to direct them to me afterwards.

[The Chair, Liberal, Scott Simms]

Thank you, Mr. Grey.

You can probably work that in to your questions and answers session coming up.

We are pressed for time, of course. It is now noon. We are officially supposed to be done, but we're going into overtime, simply because it's quite interesting. Thank you.

We're going to go seven, seven, and seven, and I'll work on the timing at the end to make sure we get another round, colleagues. We may be going until 12:30 p.m. Is that okay? Do I have consent for that?

[Some hon. members]

Agreed.

[The Chair, Liberal, Scott Simms]

Great.

Mr. Finnigan, I think we're starting with you for seven minutes.

[Pat Finnigan, Liberal, Miramichi—Grand Lake, NB]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Welcome. Bonjour. Woliwon

I would like to say that our committee—we've heard this before—is not here to replace other mechanisms to consult. We're here to hear. We're here on the river so that the whole committee can see other interactions. We've had people present to us through video conference, but I felt that it was very important that we come here to listen to everyone who has interactions on the river, including the first nations, of course. I'm hoping to be able to get most of you in.

Mr. Carr, regarding the Atlantic Salmon Federation, you referred briefly to the CAST project. I remember that when it first came up there were major concerns about releasing salmon that had been raised in captivity, even though they were wild salmon. They were captured smolts. I think that's how it works: by raising them for 18 months or 16 months after capture and then releasing them into the wild. There were concerns about their effects in nature, about how they would interact, and about the succeeding generation.

Can you elaborate on that to alleviate fears? What are your thoughts on that?

[Jonathan Carr]

The CAST initiative, to give a really quick overview for those who aren't familiar with the CAST program, involves industrial partners, academia, DFO, the Atlantic Salmon Federation, other NGOs, and first nations. There's a whole suite of projects lined up for the Miramichi watershed. The projects that are being laid out for the Miramichi watershed are going to serve as models, as innovative programs where that knowledge can be transferred to other watersheds.

One of those projects being proposed is adult supplementation. It's a smolt-to-adult supplementation program. It's about collecting wild smolts in the spring on their way out to the ocean, taking those wild smolts into the Miramichi salmon hatchery, where I think you folks are going to be visiting tomorrow, growing those fish to the adult stage, and then releasing them back into the river.

This is an innovative project, but it is an experiment. The Atlantic Salmon Federation's concern is that we want to make sure that it is run as an experiment and not as a full-fledged stocking program. This will be the first time such a stocking initiative actually has a large-scale assessment.

We're going to be looking at how well those fish are interacting in the hatchery, from the time they go into the hatchery to the time they leave the hatchery. There's going to be a lot of tracking involved with these fish, too, to see how they develop mate choices with the true wild fish, how their offspring interact, and all the way back from the offspring leaving the river and coming back to the adult stage. We want to make sure that it's done in an experimental fashion, a controlled fashion, because we don't know what the outcomes would be for this. We want to make sure there's no harm done to the river during this phase.

It is innovative in the sense that there's not a whole lot of time spent in the hatchery. That's one of the innovative stages, because for hatchery programs in general, the more time a fish spends in the hatchery, the worse off it is when it's released back into the wild. This is minimizing the time spent in the hatchery. It's more or less to see if this will actually give the wild population a boost while we research reasons as to why the salmon is declining. It's a band-aid, and it should be a short-term initiative. Once this experiment is completed, we will assess it to see whether or not it works. If it does work, then it's something that you could have in your back pocket for the Miramichi if there's a need for it.

There probably isn't a need for a full-fledged stocking program right now, but by putting this in your back pocket if it does work, it's something that could actually be applied to other river systems. There are other similar projects going on right now, one in the inner Bay of Fundy, but that's a stock that has been completely decimated so there's no harm, no foul, with that one. On the St. John River above Tobique, there's a very similar program that they're doing there as well.

That's all I have to say. If there are more questions or you want more clarification, I don't mind.

[Pat Finnigan, Liberal, Miramichi—Grand Lake, NB]

Thank you, Mr. Carr.

Chief Ginnish, I know that you've referred a lot to consulting with DFO and that, and I know that, on their side, first nations have been a doing a lot, including using different means of catching the salmon with trap nets. I know that you're also monitoring the population.

Do you feel that your traditional ways of managing the river are taken into account by DFO? Do you feel that there's good consulting in terms of your traditional methods of conserving the salmon and the whole ecosystem around it?

[Chief George Ginnish]

I'm sorry I was a little heavy on the legal in the introduction, but we had to lay the ground that we're absolutely open to co-management and speaking about options. We've been involved initially with resource managers from DFO to look at other options for food for our communities, and for the most part those discussions have not led to many other options. We've repeatedly said that for many of our people access to food is the priority, but we respect conservation. We absolutely work with that in mind. We have closed our fishery. We've reduced our fishery.

I guess to put it in perspective, our trap and net fisheries probably would catch in the area of 1,000 fish per year, and that's how many members we have. We have a little over 200 households. The report that I spoke to briefly—and I'll share that, with the food nutrition study that was done—says that our people's diet requires traditional food. We have issues around diabetes, high blood pressure, and heart disease.

When this study was done with the University of Ottawa, based on a proper sampling, it came out that our people get one tablespoon of traditional food per day. That's what it works out to, based on the access we have to fish and game currently. That massively contributes to health issues.

It's not for lack of trying to get to a table and to look at other options, to look at co-management. We've been in a bilateral process with the federal and provincial governments for a number of years. DFO is just starting to come to the table with a mandate to talk about these urgent issues, about how the Marshall decision is implemented.

It has been 15, 16, or 17 years since the Marshall Supreme Court case spoke of moderate livelihood. Our inland communities have not fared well with that process.

We have a community of 200 households. We have four commercial lobster licences that provide work for maybe a dozen of our members. We have 40% food insecurity in our community. We have 200-plus households. We have 80 households that are wondering constantly where their next meal is coming from. So that is of massive, huge concern to us.

[The Chair, Liberal, Scott Simms]

Thank you, Chief Ginnish. I appreciate it.

Gentlemen, you are splitting your time, I believe.

Mr. Doherty, you are up first.

[Todd Doherty, Conservative, Cariboo—Prince George, BC]

Yes. I'm going to first apologize to our guests for being called out. When the office phones, you must take it.

I'm going to start off by telling you a little bit about where we're from. I'm from the Cariboo area, Prince George region. Some of you on the panel, or most of you on the panel have heard of the Williams case, the Tsilhqot’in lands claim decision. Chief Joe Alphonse is one of my very oldest and best friends, and Chief Roger William as well is a good friend. My wife and my children are from the Esdilagh First Nation.

So I understand the food and ceremonial and traditional challenges that we face as we move forward. I want to say from Lheidli T’enneh, “hadih”, which is hello from our area of Prince George.

We've had a number of testimonies over the last three or four days from first nations, DFO, and recreational and commercial fishers, and earlier today we heard that there is some relationship, but it is growing. It is getting better, I guess, as we move along. I want to hear from Chief Ginnish. Is there a business relationship that you're seeing with non-aboriginal versus aboriginal, which we're growing, and an opportunity to move that forward?

[Chief George Ginnish]

Absolutely. In the Miramichi Salmon Association and the Atlantic Salmon Federation, we do speak with each other. Bill Taylor, with the Atlantic Salmon Federation, actually worked with us, sat with us, and supported us in looking at other options for food for the community.

We're open to doing it. That's part of Marshall: looking at other commercial options and food options. Our community purchased gaspereau licences that were part of our commercial lobster fishery. It provided for a spring fishery. It provided bait. But with the influx of bass, there is no more gaspereau fishery. It is gone. It is pulverized. We even asked for a bass food fishery last year. Discussions started in February. By the time we got approval, the season was pretty much gone.

We're just starting this year to utilize bass. It's challenging, because we've been pushing for the commercial to replace that, and given the numbers, you really want to be able to have a fulsome discussion about it. Is there going to be a commercial fishery? Can we talk about it? We don't have that option to actually sit and speak about things. We write letters, and they go unanswered for years. That's part of our issue. It leads to frustration. It doesn't solve any of our issues. I've mentioned briefly that there is a table that's starting. I hope that will produce some....

[Todd Doherty, Conservative, Cariboo—Prince George, BC]

We've heard testimony from you, Suju, and ACE, on the seals. Are all first nations communities within these provinces included in that?

[Suju Mahendrappa]

Yes. The founding members of ACE include both Mi'kmaq and Maliseet, as well as one person who is Métis. She's in Toronto. We really do cover the country. Our discussions to date have included numerous first nations in Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, and Prince Edward Island. We're covering all three and all nations.

[Todd Doherty, Conservative, Cariboo—Prince George, BC]

Pardon my ignorance, but again, being from central British Columbia, a forestry and farming area, I will ask if, in terms of aquaculture, there is a first nations interest in moving forward with any aquaculture commercial opportunities.

[Devin Ward, Science Officer, North Shore Micmac District Council Fisheries Centre, Eel Ground First Nation]

There definitely is interest in aquaculture. As for whether or not that's in relation to salmon, salmon is a very tricky aquaculture species. It's not really one that a first nations would like to enter this with; it's not a good starting species.

[Todd Doherty, Conservative, Cariboo—Prince George, BC]

Perhaps a land-based...?

[Devin Ward]

Yes, for sure. First nations are definitely in support of any aquaculture that is land-based. It is our view that this is the way to go. We have to move out of these water-based aquaculture facilities because of the onus they put on the environment. Because of the general way that these things are run on land, they're much more sustainable, in our view.