Good afternoon, Mr. Chairman.
I'm Graeme Gawn, and I have been an inshore, multi-species fisherman in southwest Nova Scotia for over 40 years.
Mr. Chairman, members of the committee, no one can have more concern for the health of our marine resources and the sustainable management of them than those closest to them. Those resources depend on a pristine environment, as do our livelihoods as fishermen and the well-being of our fishing communities. For as long as I have been a fisherman, fishermen's organizations have been at the forefront in making public our very reasonable concerns about protection of fish habitat in the face of projects proposed by others for our waters.
Where I come from, we have the Clean Ocean Action Committee, a coalition of organizations made up of 9,000 fishermen, processors, fish workers, and associated trades. Our committee has the unanimous written support of all municipal councils in our region. This committee is raising broad-based community concerns about oil and gas exploration on the Scotian Shelf, concerns we've been raising since the “no rigs” campaign of the 1990s that led to the moratorium on exploration on Georges Bank.
When we go before the government agencies that are responsible for regulating this activity, such as the CNSOPB, we are met with blank stares. In this case, we don't seek to block such projects, but we do insist that there be some objective, independent oversight on the environmental impacts of these projects on our fisheries and our communities. We need assurances that reasonable environmental precautions, monitoring, and response plans that have been accepted by the affected communities are in place first, as well as a guarantee that our fisheries are protected from any collateral damage caused by these projects.
What we are asking for is already part of the government's program. This government's own policy statement on environmental assessments states, “We will make environmental assessments credible again.” It further declares:
Canadians must be able to trust that government will engage in appropriate regulatory oversight, including credible environmental assessments, and that it will respect the rights of those most affected, such as Indigenous communities. While governments grant permits for resource development, only communities can grant permission.
With the environmental and social protections that we have lost, we have also lost our trust in government. Restoring lost protection must also restore our trust that government is working to protect us, our communities, our environment, and the economy it supports. For us, restoration of lost protection means restoring section 35 as a trigger under the Canadian Environmental Assessment Act. Without the trigger of section 35, fishing communities, coastal fishermen, and the ocean floor no longer have full protection from increasing uses of the coastal marine environment by other industries. Activities such as dredging, pipelines and cables, aquaculture operations, and renewable energy operations all impact fish habitat and must be subjected to very careful environmental impact assessments before being approved.
In the case of oil and gas exploration on the Scotian Shelf, some of our most important marine conservation areas find themselves with drilling rigs on their very borders, at the same time as we fishermen are being told to protect more areas to meet the government's commitments for MPAs. This is puzzling to us. We see several alternative energy projects operating, experimenting, and being proposed, often in sensitive areas, including wind and tidal power, and expanding ocean aquaculture plans in areas that we think should be protected. These projects, as innovative as they may be, must not be allowed to threaten or risk harming the marine environment, which sustains tens of thousands of jobs and a renewable resource that injects billions of dollars into the economies of hundreds of coastal communities and indeed that of Canada. Just for the record, we independent inshore fishermen consider ourselves part of that ecosystem too.
The Fisheries Act should be Canada's strongest environmental law and a key tool for regulators responsible for protecting the environment. In terms of lost protections, we would like to see a restoration of the wording of the act concerning the “harmful alteration, disruption and destruction of fish habitat,” as it served us well in the past.
We are also asking that under the scope of restoring lost protections, you fully consider changes to the Aquaculture Activities Regulations. For fishermen, the use of pesticides in open-net salmon farms poses a direct and significant threat to our coastal lobster fisheries, the most valuable fishery in Canada. The pesticides that the aquaculture industry uses to kill sea lice don't discriminate. They kill crustaceans. They kill lobsters too.
In the past, Environment Canada successfully prosecuted the aquaculture industry for illegal pesticide use. The changes brought about by the Aquaculture Activities Regulations diminish the prospects of these kinds of protections in the future. We want to see those restored as well.
I want to close with comments about the broad scope of the protections we've lost and need restored.
In the last two decades, our coastal communities and the independent fishermen who live in them have been facing an assault by corporate and foreign interests seeking to gain control over our independent owner-operator fisheries. Corporate interests have influenced officials to bend, alter, and ignore the critical fleet separation and owner-operator policies to allow them to gain control over our licences, effectively siphoning the earnings of our inshore fisheries from those coastal communities and into corporate treasuries.
In Nova Scotia, where I fish, thousands of inshore seasonal owner-operators have effectively been disenfranchised from their traditional fisheries in the drive to privatize, as the government looked the other way. This is not good public policy. It is wrong that this is allowed, and the DFO seems unwilling, or is unable, to deal with the problem.
We look forward to your report and recommendations to Parliament on how to restore our lost protections and our confidence in government.
Thank you, Mr. Chairman.