Evidence of meeting #27 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 iceland.
A recording is available from Parliament.
Liberal
Bernadette Jordan Liberal South Shore—St. Margarets, NS
Okay. Is 894,000 tonnes a sustainable amount at this point, the way things are going with your cod stocks?
Director General, Department for Fisheries and Aquaculture, Government of Norway
Yes, very much so.
October 17th, 2016 / 11:20 a.m.
Director General, Department for Fisheries and Aquaculture, Government of Norway
Yes, and it's more or less the same situation as was explained by Iceland. We are even seeing that the older part of the stock is surviving longer than expected. It is in the fishermen's part of the stock for more years than the model says it should be. It's a very promising situation just now.
Liberal
Bernadette Jordan Liberal South Shore—St. Margarets, NS
Are the fishers involved with the collection of data and the monitoring of the stocks as well, or is it strictly done through what we would call your department of fisheries and oceans?
Director General, Department for Fisheries and Aquaculture, Government of Norway
It is for the most part done by our Institute of Marine Research and the Russian counterparts in PINRO, it's called. Some fishery dependent data is used.
Liberal
Bernadette Jordan Liberal South Shore—St. Margarets, NS
This question could be for both Norway and Iceland.
What was the primary driving force of the collapse in 1989? Was it overfishing, the way it was being fished, predation, or all of the above?
Marine and Freshwater Research Institute
For Iceland it was overfishing. People could see that the cod they were catching were getting smaller every year.
Liberal
Bernadette Jordan Liberal South Shore—St. Margarets, NS
In Iceland, did you say that 200,000 to 250,000 tonnes is your quota?
Marine and Freshwater Research Institute
Our quota for the next fishing season is 244,000 tonnes.
Liberal
Marine and Freshwater Research Institute
Yes, we think so, according to our harvest control rule that has been evaluated by ICES, and so on.
Liberal
Bernadette Jordan Liberal South Shore—St. Margarets, NS
I'll go back to Norway and ask you the same question about the collapse of your stocks.
Director General, Department for Fisheries and Aquaculture, Government of Norway
When we talk about this as a collapse, what actually happened was that we were seeing a collapse in development. The catches were more than 300,000 tonnes in 1989, and the advice for a quota was 187,000 tonnes for 1990. That was actually a very, very fast reduction going on, which was more or less stopped by strict regulations from 1990 onward. The stock didn't collapse in the way that it did in Newfoundland, for instance.
When you ask why this happened, this is a question that has been debated a lot in Norway since 1990. It was partly overfishing and it was partly due to predation, especially by seals—we had a seal invasion along the coast of Denmark in the late 1980s—and maybe the biological conditions in the sea changed a little bit also, making all these factors work together in the wrong direction. But the collapse was more or less stopped by very strict regulations introduced in1990.
Liberal
Bernadette Jordan Liberal South Shore—St. Margarets, NS
Have you looked at climate change as a factor with regard to the decline of your fish stocks? It's something we've heard about here and I wonder if it's the same for you.
Director General, Department for Fisheries and Aquaculture, Government of Norway
I don't have information on—
Liberal
Director General, Department for Fisheries and Aquaculture, Government of Norway
—sea temperatures and so on.
Liberal
Bernadette Jordan Liberal South Shore—St. Margarets, NS
I have one last question.
We've been told by the committee that fishing gear and harvesting techniques have had an important impact on the decline of the cod stocks. You mentioned what you use for fishing techniques and I wrote it down but.... What's your percentage of trawler use?
Director General, Department for Fisheries and Aquaculture, Government of Norway
In Norway, approximately one-third of the quotas are fished by trawlers.
Liberal
Bernadette Jordan Liberal South Shore—St. Margarets, NS
Are there any techniques that you find are more sustainable than others?
Director General, Department for Fisheries and Aquaculture, Government of Norway
Not necessarily, not in the stock management as such. In our view, that is more about the technical regulations on how to use different kinds of gear, and how different kinds of gear should be designed, and so on—minimum mesh sizes, closed areas for trawling to protect juveniles, those kinds of things, rather than the gear itself.
Conservative
Conservative
Mel Arnold Conservative North Okanagan—Shuswap, BC
I'd like to thank the witnesses for their presentations.
I'll put these questions out to all of you to answer, if you could, from your respective positions.
We've been hearing a lot about recruitment, the state of the biomass, the age classes, and so on. Do you think we can expect to be able to do anything to enhance recruitment or ocean conditions and survival, or are we pretty much limited to managing the harvest in response to the resultant biomass that we have?
I'll give you the floor, Mr. Thordarson.
Marine and Freshwater Research Institute
Well, the common wisdom in fisheries assessment is that we only control fishing mortality, really. Therefore, there is very little we can do, other than making sure that at least enough cod grows up to spawn, and then hope for the best that they will become juveniles, and so on. Of course, if you have large predators and stuff like that, like the seals or the minke whales, and so on, that's kind of a political minefield that I won't go into.
I don't think there is much one can do to really enhance things, other than simply allowing them to grow and spawn.
