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.
Liberal
Bernadette Jordan Liberal South Shore—St. Margarets, NS
Do you think that target six should be a priority over target 11?
Vice-Chair of Science and Biodiversity, World Commission on Protected Areas, International Union for Conservation of Nature
No. I think all 20 targets are important.
Conservative
The Vice-Chair Conservative Robert Sopuck
The time is up. Time flies when you're having fun.
Now, Mr. Arnold, you have five minutes.
Conservative
Mel Arnold Conservative North Okanagan—Shuswap, BC
Thank you, Mr. Chair.
I thank all the witnesses for being here today.
I just want to confirm that we have their reports and presentations, or we will be able to get them from the clerk.
Conservative
Mel Arnold Conservative North Okanagan—Shuswap, BC
Thank you.
First of all, Ms. Nowlan, you mentioned that Canada presently has less than 1% of the waters protected under the Oceans Act.
Can you tell me what percentage of waters are protected under other protections, such as the national marine conservation areas, the marine national wildlife areas, fairly restrictive fishing closures, and so on?
Staff Counsel, West Coast Environmental Law Association
I don't have the numbers in front of me. They're in the environment committee's recent report, “Taking Action Today”. It has a lot of good up-to-date figures.
I think it's less than 2% when you put all of the federal marine protected areas together. The Oceans Act is actually less than 1%. I think it's 0.8% percent, and the total of everything is about 2%.
Conservative
Mel Arnold Conservative North Okanagan—Shuswap, BC
That's an interesting answer.
When I pull up DFO's rockfish conservation protection areas, it shows basically the entire west coast, other than the west and north coasts of Vancouver Island, as rockfish protection areas. It's interesting that those areas wouldn't be considered as protected areas in some way.
Staff Counsel, West Coast Environmental Law Association
They're not designated under one of the federal acts. That's why they're not counted.
Conservative
Mel Arnold Conservative North Okanagan—Shuswap, BC
Exactly, but we do have a lot greater than 1% protection for our marine waters in one form or another, maybe not simply under the Oceans Act.
Mr. Woodley, you quoted a much higher biomass within MPAs. How do we determine an optimal biomass, or is it simply that the sky is the limit? At what level would you consider, or how is it considered that there is a sustainable or a harvestable surplus to maintain sustainability?
Vice-Chair of Science and Biodiversity, World Commission on Protected Areas, International Union for Conservation of Nature
Can I address your first question on the rockfish conservation areas, first?
Vice-Chair of Science and Biodiversity, World Commission on Protected Areas, International Union for Conservation of Nature
The rockfish conservation areas are actually quite small. I'm sure Sean can elaborate on this, but they are included in that 1%, all the rockfish conservation areas. There's not a huge area that's protected that is uncounted at this point. I wanted to make that point clear.
In terms of how much biomass, there is no optimal number. We could spend a lot of time going into ecosystem theory here, but the biomass is based upon the productivity in the system, the perturbations that happen to that system, and how long it has been around. That's one of the reasons you want to have some areas that you don't fish, so you know how these systems function. They can act as reference points so you can calculate how much fish you're going to take out of the system without doing significant injury. You can calculate these reference limits, for example.
Conservative
Mel Arnold Conservative North Okanagan—Shuswap, BC
Thank you.
Mr. Cox, you made the statement that ocean sampling is always biased. Could you elaborate a little bit more on that? It was an interesting statement.
Prof. Sean Cox
The only way to sample fish is to pull them up to the surface, so you need a net, or you need hooks, traps, or whatever it is that fish will go into. We have an entire sablefish fishery on the west coast that's one of the most valuable in Canada. It's highly selective because only sablefish go into traps that they set on the bottom—not only. They get sablefish. They get some rougheye rockfish, but that's about it. If that were your sampling method, you'd think the world was only made of sablefish.
If you take a trawl net, for instance, here on the east coast we found that when the trawl moratorium was put in place, in 1992 I believe, there was such a strong reduction in trawl fishing that the halibut took off—Atlantic halibut took off—because that trawl fishery tended to catch small halibut, and every new year class of halibut that would come out was getting taken out by the cod fishery.
Gill nets are the same. They're very selective for size. With hooks, you can control the size of the fish and the species that you catch, depending on the size of hook you use.
Conservative
Mel Arnold Conservative North Okanagan—Shuswap, BC
Your statement that there's bias, it's bias towards one species that might be targeted—
Conservative
Liberal
Ken McDonald Liberal Avalon, NL
Thank you Mr. Chair. Thank you to our witnesses for appearing here today.
It's interesting to hear some comments. I think it was Ms. Nowlan who said when John Cabot came here, his boat literally got stuck in cod. You could scoop them up in a basket. Twenty-five years later, since the cod moratorium, we still don't have a viable commercial cod fishery, still with no rebuilding plan for a fish that's been listed in the “cautious” or “critical” zone for quite some time now, probably 25 years or longer, because the stock that was still fished commercially prior to 1992 was very low as well, yet a commercial fishery continued.
Where do you think we've gone wrong in that particular fishery, for it to be 25 years later...? Have we ignored predation, and I'll mention Mr. Morlock and his comments about the seals, because we can't get anyone to tell us what seals really eat. We have no proof they eat cod. We have no proof they eat salmon. If they're not eating those fish, they should be skinnier than my pin, but every seal you see is as fat as can be. They're eating something out there, and I suggest they're probably eating a lot more cod than anyone thinks they're eating, or anyone is willing to admit they're eating.
Again I'll go back to my question, where do you think we've gone wrong with that particular species, for it to be 25 years later and we're still in a very critical zone?
Staff Counsel, West Coast Environmental Law Association
Thanks. I'm really not the person to answer that question, unfortunately, but I do appreciate your focus on what is known as shifting baselines. You heard from Dr. Daniel Pauly who invented that term. I just want to say it wasn't only when John Cabot came here. When the habitat provisions of the Fisheries Act were being debated, an MP from Nova Scotia's south shore said that the stocks were so depleted that it was almost cause for a national holiday if salmon was caught in his river.
Minister Roméo LeBlanc in the same debate over the Fisheries Act and new habitat spoke about how Atlantic salmon that used to crowd the banks of eastern rivers had been reduced to a fraction of their former size, and how over 70% of habitat had been lost from the world's most important salmon river, the Fraser.
I'm not the cod scientist. I'm not one of the Fisheries management experts we have here, but I do think that this phenomenon of shifting baselines is really critical. If you look at historical photographs, you see the size of fish that people caught compared to today. We need to establish MPAs so we can get this baseline information. Actually, we're too late for that in a lot of cases. How can we get the original historical baseline? It's pretty hard.
Prof. Sean Cox
I have a couple.
There's a general rule in fisheries stock assessment, population dynamics, and so on that you cannot know the optimal size of a stock until you overfish it. Letting a stock grow to its largest size tells you nothing about the optimal productivity of that stock. That's a mathematical kind of thing.
Over the past couple of years, I've been working on two of the cod stocks, the northern cod in 2J3KL and the southern gulf. The southern gulf stock is about to be extirpated. No marine protected area is going to help it because it probably is the seals. The stock is so low that even a small amount of predation by seals is enough. That seal population has gone from about 9,000 in the 1970s to in the hundreds of thousands now. It's a completely different ecosystem in there.
The northern cod, it turns out.... A year ago DFO put together a competing stock assessment type of meeting where two people, Noel Cadigan and I, both developed independent stock assessments for northern cod. One of the things that came up—DFO scientists at the time thought it was going on but nobody really believed it—was that there was an increase in natural mortality just prior to the collapse. Both of these models are showing this. It's the same thing that we see in the southern gulf, high natural mortality. It's a different type. It's a high, persistent, natural mortality in the southern gulf, but it was some sort of mortality event in northern cod.
Then there was another event in the late 1990s soon after the moratorium. There was another one of these relatively high natural mortality events. That could have been one of the things that prevented recovery following the closure.
The issue here is that we have a really hard time predicting anything about nature. That's one of the arguments in favour of MPAs. If you can't predict anything, then just close it, which is fine if that's what you want to do. Some of the predictions of what MPAs are going to do and how they're going to benefit, I think, are not quite as robust as they could be.
Conservative
The Vice-Chair Conservative Robert Sopuck
That's time. Thank you very much.
This is just an anecdote of my own to follow up on Professor Cox's thing. I'm a fisheries biologist myself. We were doing an Arctic char study south of Rankin Inlet. In the first year we counted 40,000 fish. It's very easy to count Arctic char. The next year, we counted 40,000 fish. Each year it was 40,000 fish. The next year 80,000 fish showed up. Where did they come from? The next year it was 120,000 fish. Again, I think what Professor Cox is saying is absolutely true. It's fiendishly difficult to predict what goes on in marine and freshwater environments.
With that, I'll turn it over to Mr. Doherty and Mr. Arnold for five minutes.