Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Oceans North promotes science-based and community-based conservation of Canada's northern seas consistent with Inuit land claims and traditional practices.
My name is Trevor, as you know, and most of my working life, to put it in perspective, has been in one way or another involved with the fishery. I have spent a considerable number of years on fishing vessels as a crew member and captain. I have sat on ministerial advisory councils, including the Fisheries Resource Conservation Council, when we closed down pretty well every fishery in Atlantic Canada in the mid-nineties—an unpleasant task. I have also been minister of fisheries and aquaculture in Newfoundland and Labrador, which was a slightly less unpleasant task. Suffice it to say that I've been around long enough now to have seen just about everything once and a lot of it twice, as my former deputy used to say.
My presentation today will focus on, number one, the lack of connection between the Fisheries Act and the Oceans Act; the disconnect between habitat protection and the impact of fishing; the reliance on ministerial and departmental discretion rather than legislative direction in the implementation of fisheries policy; and finally, the public disclosure of information related to the management of the fishery.
Apart from all the criticisms that have been directed at the 2012 amendments to the habitat protection provisions of the Fisheries Act, there are two much more fundamental deficiencies in the way in which the act deals with habitat protection, which Margot alluded to.
First, relevant provisions of the act are insufficiently proactive. They have little to say about the identification and positive protection of critical habitat.
Second, as judicially interpreted, the HADD provisions of the act do not apply to fishing practices which themselves are destructive of fish habitat. This is a particular concern in marine areas since, as the West Coast Environmental Law's “Scaling up the Fisheries Act” report recognizes, “Fishing practices still have the greatest impact to marine habitat, according to marine cumulative impact studies.”
DFO's own sensitive benthic areas policy recognizes the same concerns when it states that “the greatest impact to the most vulnerable benthic habitats, communities and species in a given area can be caused by the first few fishing events”.
Currently, the Fisheries Act and the Oceans Act read as two solitudes. The Fisheries Act is firmly rooted in the 19th century, when it was primarily written, while the Oceans Act acknowledges the huge expansion in Canada's marine areas as a result of the Convention on the Law of the Sea in 1982 and, along with that, an important set of international responsibilities.
There is also a significant normative difference between the two statutes. While the Fisheries Act seems isolationist and fails to acknowledge the importance of principles and objectives, the Oceans Act celebrates the importance of the oceans and Canada's global responsibilities and references the ecosystem approach and other important principles. The committee might draw inspiration from revisiting the preamble to the Oceans Act and asking how the ideas and goals expressed in that statute might also inform a reformed Fisheries Act.
I'll just point out to the translators here that all of the “H's” are in that statement, but I'm from Newfoundland, and they just mightn't be in the spots that you're used to.