Thank you for the opportunity to speak with you today.
The Canadian Wildlife Federation is a national charity. It has about 250,000 supporters. We work through education, science-based policy, and outreach to conserve and inspire the conservation of Canada's wildlife and habitats for the use and enjoyment of all.
I want to provide some context, and then jump right into loss protections and modern safeguards.
I want to start by emphasizing the importance of fish habitat in Canada. It is important from a fisheries point of view. Aboriginal fisheries have critical cultural and subsistence value. Commercial fisheries have a direct value of $6 billion or more per year. Recreational fisheries have a value of $8 billion per year and engage millions of Canadians. Fish habitat is also important in terms of ecosystem services, such as flood control, water quality, and water quantity, and simply because of the intrinsic value of our aquatic biodiversity to Canadians. The task at hand is large, and it is important to all Canadians that we protect our freshwater environments and our fish.
Another aspect of that context is the current status of fish habitat in Canada. On the left are some photos of some fish habitats in various states of alteration. On the right is perhaps one of the closest things we have to a national status map of fish habitat, which it actually is not; it's a stress index developed by Dr. Cindy Chu, and the darker blue areas are the higher-stress areas for fish habitat.
In a nutshell, we could say that habitat quality was declining under the 1986 policy of no net loss, and that it continues to decline today despite prohibition on serious harm. Having said that, I would say that there are many very good examples of improvements to fish habitat, of good restoration projects, and of excellent offsets, but overall our evaluation would be one of continued decline. The known causes of this fall into three categories: direct destruction and alteration from projects; indirect destruction and alteration through land use; and destruction and alteration of habitat by fishing practices.
I also want to provide the context for why we are talking about the fish habitat provisions and the goals from the perspective of the Canadian Wildlife Federation.
In our view, it is really to set the overarching federal regulatory policy and program framework to protect existing fish habitat, restore the legacy of past harms to fish habitat, and compensate effectively for future harms to fish and fish habitat. Doing this will require a balanced effort and investment in both freshwater and marine habitats.
Our testimony will focus on loss protections and modern safeguards. I just want to preface this by saying that while we'll focus on loss protections, we do think there were a number of changes to the act that came from earlier consultations that were beneficial and that can be built on as we move forward.
The first aspect of loss protections is confusion over where this prohibition now applies. We believe that derives directly from the requirement to link the prohibition either directly or indirectly to a fishery, so there's a bit of confusion over where in the landscape section 35 actually applies.
We have two recommendations. One is to amend section 35's language to apply the prohibition to all fish and all fish habitats. However, we would like to see the maintenance and the acknowledgement of the importance of all three types of fisheries in the interpretation and implementation of this act. The second aspect of loss protection involves what is protected by section 35. It is largely similar. However, there's one area of change, which is that there's a lack of clarity around how the prohibition under section 35 applies to temporary alterations of fish habitat. There is also confusion stemming from the use of the term “serious harm to fish”, although it is defined in the act. Finally, there is the loss of 25 years of jurisprudence to provide clarity on what the prohibition actually means.
Again, our recommendation is clear: amend the language of section 35 to prohibit the death of fish and the harmful alteration, disruption, and destruction of fish habitat.
Finally, there are the loss protections in how we deliver fish habitat protection. These stem from massive changes—I would describe them as massive, and they've been going on for many years—to policy, program, and capacity. We'll focus on some aspects of this.
First would be project review. We have greatly reduced staff capacity in both numbers and years of experience. There is self-assessment of projects with no registry or auditing. Service standards are met largely by triage out of lower-risk projects, and there is no capacity internally to develop a more efficient framework for delivering on the responsibility to protect fish habitat.
Next, in terms of enforcement, staff and equipment were severely cut, with no alternative arrangement in place with provinces, and few fines or warnings are being issued.
Finally, on monitoring, there was no capacity before 2012 and no capacity after 2012, and this needs to change.
Our recommendation is to strategically invest in DFO capacity to design, operate, and enforce a fish habitat protection program and to continue building partnerships with NGOs and other sectors of society to deliver it, because DFO cannot do this alone. If it's going to succeed, this is going to have to be a co-operative and collaborative approach to protecting fish habitat.
I'd now like to move on to modern safeguards, where we have six points to make.
The first—and our overarching point—is that any changes made to the program or the law should really focus on better outcomes for fish and fish habitat. That means achieving better outcomes, not just building process. Build the process to achieve the outcomes we want. Adopt a national goal of achieving a net gain in fish habitat and already-impacted watersheds and allow and support experimentation and “learning by doing” in authorizing, offsetting, and monitoring harm. This may have been one of the key shortfalls of the previous program, in that it wasn't allowed to experiment and push flexibility in ways of doing things for authorizing and offsetting.
The second point is to address cumulative effects. Mechanisms to offset incremental impacts are essential, and this does not mean issuing authorizations for every single small activity that a Canadian citizen undertakes on the landscape. There are other tools available, such as, for example: regulated standards that create ticketable offences; a public registry of self-assessed projects to track and audit what's going on in the landscape; dedicated fees in lieu of offsets; and other program and policy tools that address moderate and low-risk activities.
The third point is to require fish passage. Fish passage provisions were clarified and updated in 2012. There is little improvement in implementation, and it is 100% discretionary and generally not applied. In fact, last year, the environmental commissioner of Ontario pointed out that this discretionary power has rarely been used in Ontario. Of more than 2,500 dams in the province, fewer than 50 have a fishway.
The fourth point is watershed or management zone planning. We see section 6 factors added to the act as requiring an outcomes-based regulation program. If you want to focus on outcomes, you need to have some kind of plan or goal at a watershed or management level. This includes fisheries management objectives, some sense of the current status of the habitat, and some sense of—or, even better, objectives or goals for—the desired future state. This would provide a context for review and authorization, mechanisms to protect watersheds from damaging land use practices, and strategic habitat restoration and offsetting.
Our fifth point under modern safeguards is habitat banking. Canada needs a habitat banking program for fish habitat. This requires legal enablement of third party banking. It requires the establishment of regulations and guidelines that make sure this program leads to real benefits for fish and fish habitat. We are open to experimentation with other market-based tools.
Finally, our sixth point is on partnership approaches to achieving modern safeguards. Governments around the world are turning to partnerships to deliver on regulatory responsibilities. At a federal-provincial level, we believe there's a need for a new national accord for the protection of fish habitat, as well as renewed agreements with the provinces for enforcement that is tied to funding.
In the public sector, we believe that NGOs, universities, and industry need to find ways to collaborate with government. The Canadian Wildlife Federation has taken the first steps in building a national partnership for aquatic habitat. We believe this partnership can lead to enhanced science tools, better translation of science into policy, and concrete on-the-ground restoration that benefits fish habitat. One form this could take is an increased commitment to the RFCP program that is more strategic and partnership-focused, as well as agreements that allow for program delivery by non-government partners.
I will leave it there. Thank you for your time. I look forward to your questions.