Thank you.
I just want to give you a little bit of additional background on myself. I'm also the co-founder and chief technical officer for Landmark Fisheries Research, which is a small consulting firm. We do research that supports the fisheries community, including fishing associations, Fisheries and Oceans Canada, as well as some environmental organizations. Most of our projects involve fishery stock assessment, harvest strategy analysis, survey design, as well as some ecosystem-based management strategy development.
I'm also the chair of the scientific review board for the International Pacific Halibut Commission, and I'm a member of the joint technical committee for the Pacific hake treaty.
My background lies mainly in fisheries science, stock assessment, survey design, harvest strategy evaluation, and more collaborative ecosystem-based fisheries management. I've been involved in several assessments on both the east and west coasts of Canada, in Chile, and in South Africa. I have a bit of experience, and most of it is in fisheries management directly.
I have a few points about MPAs. I'm not an expert in MPAs, but I am a fisheries scientist and can understand the role of MPAs. I do happen to work on one, which is the Bowie Seamount Marine Protected Area on the west coast. I am also involved in some of the rockfish conservation areas on the west coast.
Most of my points are not going to be very supportive of MPAs in general for fisheries management. As Stephen just pointed out, there may be benefits to closing an area to the local sedentary fish populations within that closed area, but the actual benefits to fisheries are quite minimal.
I'll just go through these points.
First, protecting land resources is very different than protecting resources in the ocean. The ocean is a transport medium. It moves nutrients, water masses, and organisms over thousands of kilometres, and it may not move them over the same thousands of kilometres from year to year. Putting a static MPA in place in the ocean will protect a particular species or group of species in a particular area at a particular time.
Looking at some of the previous testimony, there was a claim that there was overwhelming scientific proof that MPAs are beneficial and widely successful. I think that was misrepresentation of the actual science. Stephen just cited some of the studies that find that they're not broadly successful.
In fact, I was going to mention these five criteria. For an MPA to be successful, you need all five. You need 100% protection. You need very strict enforcement. You need long duration before you can detect any changes. They need to be at least 100 square kilometres in size. They need to be highly isolated. The last one—being highly isolated—is really hard to meet. In fact, only four of the 87 MPAs around the world in that study could actually be considered successful.
Just enforcing MPAs would be hugely expensive. Again, if you're looking at it from a fisheries management point of view, it's far more cost effective to do other things that don't cost that much.
A point I'm going to make later about that enforcement issue is that one of the things MPAs do is promote a lot of illegal fishing. If you look at our abalone fisheries on the west coast, they're subject to rampant illegal fishing.
Our RCAs, the little rockfish conservation areas along the coast are almost all fished. The only ones who don't fish in there are the commercial fishing vessels, which have vessel monitoring systems on them that can actually detect if they go in these areas. All the recreational boats, first nations, and anyone who wants to go out and sell fish on the black market can go in those areas. As you know, these are really remote places where it's not difficult to go in and fish illegally.
MPAs aren't likely to be effective scientific tools, either. They're not easily replicated. When you put in an MPA, it's subject to a high degree of what we call “location and time” effects. You can't just create a nice experiment where you have three of the same type of MPA in one place and then three control areas in another place. You just can't do that. They're wide open to outside perturbations, environmental changes that are not within our control.
The big issue is that the sampling of ecosystems, at least over a large area like 100 square kilometres, has very low statistical power. That means you have a low probability of actually detecting any kinds of changes, even if they actually exist, unless you spend a whole lot of money. Sampling marine systems is very expensive, it's time-consuming, it's technologically demanding, and it's always biased. On land you can go out and observe things or use satellite imagery. You can't do that in the ocean. You have to put some sort of sampling gear down to collect organisms, and that's always biased.
The MPA benefits to fisheries, as I was mentioning, are marginal. There's some evidence for this. Implementing Canada's sustainable fisheries framework is probably a more effective activity than using MPAs, broadly. Issues like discarding and misreporting are not, at least on the west coast of Canada, major issues, at least in the commercial fisheries. Those are either monitored directly by human observers on 100% of groundfish vessels or video-audited logbooks are used. The monitoring system on the west coast is the standard. It's the best monitoring system in the world. There are also strong limits on discarding in our fisheries on the west coast as well.
I made the point earlier about illegal fishing. The prices that are out there for sablefish and halibut are huge. In fact just this weekend I was talking to somebody who found himself fishing in a rockfish conservation area by accident this past summer. He couldn't believe how fast they were catching halibut. That was because there are no commercial fisherman in there, and somebody can get in there and fish illegally quite easily.
I just want to make a couple of points about when MPAs could be effective.
I think MPAs are needed to protect non-commercial benthic invertebrate species such as corals and sponges. These kinds of things form fish habitat. Nobody wants to destroy them. They're generally sedentary. They don't move very much. They tend to have high larval retention in the areas where they occur, and they have this isolation feature. They're mappable. They're not moving. The data you collect today will probably be relevant 20 years from now. We can build maps of where these things probably occur and actually work with them.
In fact, a lot of the fishing industry on the west coast, the groundfish industries that tend to affect bottom habitat, and all of those organizations support protecting sensitive benthic habitat. Just throughout the MPA that I work on, the Bowie Seamount, Wild Canadian Sablefish has spent over a quarter of a million dollars studying corals and sponges in that marine protected area. They developed their own custom deepwater cameras and motion-sensing systems on their gear. They're doing everything they can to try to minimize impacts on those resources.
My final point is one that was raised earlier, about just the arbitrariness of choosing 10% or 20% MPA coverage of the ocean. I think this needs to be reversed a bit. I mean, 10% or 20% is not 10% or 20% of ecosystems or of species. I think the point is to try to establish some sort of practical and feasible set of goals that can be put in place for particular species in particular ecosystems and start from there. It's much easier to sell this kind of practical and feasible set of goals than it is an arbitrary 10% or 20% approach.