Evidence of meeting #58 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 mpas.
A recording is available from Parliament.
Conservative
Conservative
Mel Arnold Conservative North Okanagan—Shuswap, BC
My question is to Mr. Morlock and Mr. Cox. Looking at overall wildlife management, do you feel that it's possible for these potential marine protected areas to be naturally continuing or without need for any intervention, considering that we are attempting to so intensively manage other species?
What I'm referring to is that we always seem to manage our fisheries species by limiting our catch on fisheries, but we don't do anything to deal with other predators on the species. Do you think that's possible within these MPAs, that we won't have to go in and intervene in some way?
Prof. Sean Cox
We haven't been very successful at that anywhere, in predator control, introducing predators to control things. A lot of those things have gone badly in wildlife management. There is more and more attention being paid to culling marine mammals because the marine mammal protection legislation has been wildly successful and we have lots of marine mammals.
Those are difficult questions. I don't know.
Chair of Government Affairs Committee, Canadian Sportfishing Industry Association
I would concur with that. One point to be made is that the terrestrial paradigm for protected areas has been extrapolated into the MPA discussion and they're an apple and a pear. In fact, they might not even both be a fruit. I think sometimes things cross over that maybe don't belong. They're unique to themselves.
Conservative
Conservative
The Vice-Chair Conservative Robert Sopuck
We'll have to cut it off there.
I would commend to the committee an article I came across in The New York Times of April 30, 2017. Some of you might have seen it. It's entitled “China's Appetite Pushes Fisheries to the Brink”. The article talks at great length about the subsidized fishing that is going on from China. They have 2,600 vessels subsidized by the government, traversing the globe, scooping up fish in international waters.
All of us have different views on management of fish, but we all care deeply about the health of our fish stocks. That is the same for our four witnesses. I want to thank you very much for this extraordinarily interesting testimony. We kept you right to very end. We could have kept going even more. Thank you for being here and we look forward to talking to you again sometime.
The meeting is adjourned.