Thank you, Mr. Chairman, co-chairs, members.
My name is Otto Langer. I am a fisheries biologist. I've been involved in fisheries biology across Canada for about 50 years now. I spent about 33 of those years with the Department of Fisheries and Oceans and Environment Canada.
Some of the comments I make will go beyond DFO and amendments to the habitat section of the Fisheries Act, and the entire Fisheries Act. I think a lot of my comments relate to Environment Canada, and at times even to Transport Canada.
Habitat and water quality has been a political football in government in the 50 years I've been around. When certain governments are in place, they want to turn off the civil service, and would like to hide the Fisheries Act. When I was with government, at times we were told that no one wanted to see a copy of the Fisheries Act on our desk. Unfortunately, the resource base suffers when we see these ups and downs. Now we're into about a 16-year down cycle, unfortunately.
Looking at the Fisheries Act and amendments we can make to it is only a quarter of the issue. You need good legislation; however, you need good political direction with some balance of science in that political direction. You need a strong will within the agencies to do the job. Right now that doesn't exist. You need the organization and the resources to do the job.
We've reached a low point in the last 50 years. Our legislation has gone downhill. Political direction has been terrible in the recent past. There is no will in DFO or in Environment Canada to do the job. The organization is suffering a lot, and the resources have been cut, especially in 2012.
I've done a great deal on the history of the Fisheries Act and how the work has been done, including affidavits to the B.C. Supreme Court. I was considered an expert on the habitat pollution provisions of the Fisheries Act. That was tendered as an affidavit. I'm not going to go into that. I think my brief is 100 pages long. I just want to dwell on the first seven pages.
Prior to 1967, and my joining the Department of Fisheries and Oceans from the University of Alberta, there was no real habitat law of any sort in the Fisheries Act, other than to look at blockages from dams, low flows below dams. A section of the Fisheries Act said that when you were logging, you couldn't put debris in the stream. However, we were losing a lot of streams in British Columbia due to gravel companies, logging road builders. They were mining gravel directly out of the spawning beds of salmon streams. So in 1967, the government was convinced to put through an order in council, and the B.C. gravel removal order was put in place. That is the beginning of a habitat law in Canada.
Then in 1976, some of us campaigned for a couple of years to get habitat protection into the Fisheries Act, and Parliament, in its wisdom, passed the habitat section, which we called HADD, harmful alteration, disruption or destruction of fish habitat. We saw that as a giant step forward. That seemed to create a lot of confusion in Canada.
That was followed up with a defining policy, which some people referred to as the no net loss policy. It was a national fisheries policy, and it received a lot of good feedback from around the world in being one of the first sustainable development policies on earth.
In the 1960s and 1970s we went from a rapid net loss of fish habitat to no net loss and the HADD provisions of the Fisheries Act. We didn't achieve zero loss. We were at the point of what I would call a slow net loss. In the 1980s, we reviewed projects through the FEARO process, the federal environment assessment review office. We had no Canadian environmental assessment act. We had regional screening coordination committees.
Quite a good job was done without legislation, just orders in council. In 1995, CEAA came along. Unfortunately CEAA was greatly watered down in 2012. For instance, in British Columbia, it went from 495 to five reviewable projects. An example is a jet fuel terminal in the Fraser River. Probably one of the worst places to put a jet fuel terminal is in the middle of a world-class estuary. In 1988, when the airport consortium tried to put it in, the federal government held a proper FEARO review, and the project was rejected as too great a risk to the Fraser River.
In 2011, the feds weren't even there. They had delegated the reviews on the Fraser River to the Vancouver Port Authority, and the feds didn't do a review of any sort. Environment Canada and Fisheries just disappeared from the scene. The project is now approved and it's 10 times larger than what was rejected in 1988.
There's something wrong in Canada right now in terms of where is DFO; where is the legislation, and we're at a point of rapid net loss of habitat again.
One big thing that we lost in CEAA was the fisheries law trigger. If there was a harmful alteration, it triggered a proper environmental review. The Harper government did remove that, and that was a giant setback. That also applied to the Navigable Waters Protection Act, as that act and the Fisheries Act did complement each other.
In summary, I'd like to say that here we are in 2016 and we've lost habitat protection provisions in the Fisheries Act. We've lost connections between habitat protection needs, between CEAA, between DFO, Environment Canada, and NWPA. We've lost habitat protection offices and staff. There's no habitat enforcement, despite what the DFO bureaucrats and past ministers have said. We have next to no public review in terms of environmental assessments. Key habitat protection has been delegated to the industry—it has self-compliance—and to the federal harbours. Now we've put the wolf in charge of the sheep. That's where we sit in Canada.
There's a lack of connection of fish to the overall ecosystem health. If we go to DFO, we'll see how they have an ecosystem management branch that means nothing. We're doing less ecosystem work now than we probably ever have in the past, and the laws and the agencies are fragmented so much we can't bring the ecosystem together.
The recommendations I would make are the following:
Restore section 35 to the act to be more or less worded as it was in the past. That was a giant step forward to protect habitat in Canada, and it was basically neutered or butchered by the past government.
We should retain generally the definition of what is fish habitat in Canada.
We should eliminate the 2012 provision that it's illegal to permanently or seriously harm fish habitat or fish exposed to a commercial, aboriginal, or recreation fishery.
Fish habitat law now should relate to any waterway in Canada that supports fish or a fishery, not just fish exposed to a type of fishery.
Any significant harmful alteration or destruction of habitat must be subject to a proper environmental assessment under CEAA. It must be meaningful, transparent, and allow maximum public input. That's not the case right now.
We should develop a habitat violation ticket system for lower-level violations and retain the general provisions for major offences.
We have to restore reasonable resources and scientific capability to DFO. That's so essential. We've had a terrible recruitment of many managers in the last 12 years. They're not there to do the job; they're there to basically play political football. The present minister has to get over that problem somehow. A lot of key people who had a lot of experience were basically laid off. The agency has to dig itself out of the hole.
We need to have a proper and effective enforcement program. We have next to nothing.
In my brief, on page 8, there's a graph indicating where enforcement investigations have gone in Canada. They've gone right downhill from about 1,800 in 2002 to about 300 in 2010, and they're now almost at zero, especially when it comes to prosecutions. I think in 1998, we had 48 convictions in Canada; under habitat law in 2008 we had one; in 2015 we had zero. If that doesn't indicate a problem, we have a real problem on our hands.
We have to recognize DFO as being separate from fish farming. I think fish farming should be given to another ministry, like agriculture. DFO is still in a great conflict of interest where it promotes fish farming and pretends it also protects habitat.
The last comment I'll make before I close is that I know you'll be meeting with DFO civil servants and high-level deputy ministers. In the 33 years I have worked with DFO, things were good in the first several years. It was almost—I hate to use the term—the golden years, but people had the will, and they did the job, and I think they were quite honest. Now we find politically inspired staff at very high levels in the agency, including the regional offices. I think there's a tremendous lack of honesty in DFO, and the public has no trust in them at all. I think all you have to do is look at some of the material they produce on the Internet that's available to all Canadians.
We look at page 4 in this document on projects near water. It talks about how the amendments to the Fisheries Act in 2012 brought everything together and consolidated it. Well, the exact opposite has happened. Now pollution is looked after by Environment Canada. Serious offences are looked after by DFO. Aquaculture is looked after by another part of DFO. If it involves any nuclear facility, the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission handles the Fisheries Act on that. If it involves an energy project, the National Energy Board looks after the Fisheries Act on that.
Certain provinces, such as New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, and Prince Edward Island, look after the federal fisheries. We've delegated half of that protection to the national harbours, 17 of them in Canada. How can the bureaucrats say that they consolidated it and brought it together with the Harper changes? The exact opposite is happening. In my experience in the government, when we pretend we've brought it all together and we say this, you can be 90% certain that we are going in the opposite direction. That's what's happening right now.
Thank you.