Good morning, everyone, and thank you for inviting me here.
The BC Seafood Alliance is an umbrella organization whose 17 members represent about 90% of wild harvested seafood from Canada's west coast, worth about $850 million annually. Our members are associations representing all or most of the licence-holders in virtually every major wild fishery in B.C. That would include salmon and herring, which once were the backbone of the industry. Those have now been overtaken by the success of prawns, sablefish, halibut, geoduck, and other groundfish and dive fisheries. We are the most representative fisheries organization on the west coast, but our ultimate constituents are independent fishermen and businesses up and down the coast. These are the people who provide food to Canadians and to the world.
I want to talk a little bit about our fisheries first, partly because in reading through the blues, I've been a bit dismayed by the understanding of fisheries and fisheries management on the west coast. I'm referring to the assumption that what may hold true for fisheries in some parts of the world—say, overfishing, an increase in fishing footprint, wasted and unreported catch—applies in British Columbia. That's simply not true.
Conservation has driven our sector for the past 20 years. It has shaped the way it has developed and encouraged a pragmatic approach to stewardship that has really worked in market terms as well. More than half our fisheries by volume are in the marine stewardship council program. The MSC is the gold standard for independent third-party verification of sustainability. It works through an arm's-length third-party process. Only 10% of the world's fisheries have so far qualified for MSC certification. We're part of that. Most of our other fisheries are recognized either by the Monterey Bay Aquarium's Seafood Watch or the Vancouver Aquarium's Ocean Wise as good choices for consumers.
By volume, almost two-thirds of our fisheries are managed under the Canadian groundfish integration program. CGIP integrates the management of 66 different species, seven different fishery sectors, and three gear types—that's hook and line, trap and trawl. The most important thing here is that under that program, a vessel is fully accountable for every single fish it catches, whether those fish are retained or released. That is verified through a monitoring program that includes100% at-sea observers, or 100% electronic monitoring, and 100% dockside monitoring.
Groundfish integration is recognized by the MSC as “one of the most rigorous in the world”, by Prince Charles' sustainability unit as a world fisheries success story, and by the David Suzuki Foundation as, quote, “among the best-managed fisheries on the planet”. It creates incentives for long-term stewardship of the resource and the ecosystem, encouraging fishermen to be highly selective in catching the fish they want and not weak or endangered species.
For example, our groundfish trawl fleet, working again with the David Suzuki Foundation and other conservation groups through a habitat conservation collaboration agreement, has frozen the trawl footprint. It has taken out 9,000 square metres of the coast, protected 50% of all habitat types, especially deepwater habitat, and it has instituted the world's first conservation bycatch quota for corals and sponges. Fleetwide, the quota for corals and sponges was set at 4,500 kilograms. In fact, it has been less than a fifth of that every year the program has been in place.
I'm giving you this information as context for the points that I want to make on MPAs. Let me be clear: we support the international commitment and the minister's target of 5% by the end of this year, and 10% by 2020. We believe we can and should be partners in achieving this goal, but we are becoming more skeptical that what's happening on the west coast meets the government's commitment to science, evidence-based decision-making, transparency, and collaboration.
Here is where we are on the Pacific coast, according to Environment and Climate Change Canada's most recent international reporting according to UN and IUCN rules. B.C. accounts for less than 8% of Canada's coastline, but currently we account for 28% of the total marine protected areas. We currently protect 3.2% of the marine and coastal area in B.C.
Newer areas just identified for protection this year, such as the Scott Islands, will take that to 6.3%. That's above the 5% threshold. Today I think there will be an announcement of a large offshore area of interest. If we assume that this will protect about 10% of the offshore, the total level of protection in B.C. by 2020 should be at least 13.2%—more than the 10%—and that's before we include other effective area-based conservation measures or new protected areas in the northern shelf under the Canada-British Columbia MPA network strategy. We're certainly ready to do our part in B.C., but we don't think we should be expected to shoulder more than our share of conservation requirements, and we really need to be part of the process.
Protected areas certainly are a part of the fisheries management tool box, especially for protecting spawning areas, habitat, and special benthic features. We've done our part in that too. Our groundfish fleet voluntarily protected the Hecate Strait glass-sponge reefs starting in 2001 until they were formally closed in 2003 and eventually designated as an MPA earlier this year.
Most of the science on MPAs has looked at warm-zone coral reefs, where fish are tied to place, usually in areas where fisheries management doesn't work very well. In such cases, there's strong evidence that MPAs, including large no-take zones, really do work. By contrast, the science suggests that in MPAs in such areas as New Zealand, Australia, the U.S., Canada, Iceland, Norway, and even large parts of the EU, all countries with good management systems, biodiversity goals are best served by strong fisheries management, particularly enforced harvest control roles. In these jurisdictions there's evidence that MPAs simply displace fishing activity and concentrate it detrimentally in other locations, often decreasing, not increasing, biodiversity. This makes ecosystem-based management harder to achieve while increasing dependency on foreign fisheries that are not as well managed as our own.
On the west coast, we're not seeing a lot of evidence-based decision-making. It's beginning to look like political decision-making. The exact boundaries of fishing limitations around the Hecate Strait sponge reefs were a consensus recommendation from a multi-stakeholder group that included the ENGO community. This went to Canada Gazette, part I. Those boundaries were changed by the federal government in response to push-button responses from the ENGO community.
We're kind of seeing the same thing with the Scott Islands. More than 10,000 automated push-button responses from ENGO websites apparently outweigh the science, analysis, and considered consensus recommendations from the advisory committee, which included many of those same ENGOs. This is not how you do evidence-based decision-making, and it's not how you do collaboration. It just blows up any chance of effective collaboration, compromise, and consensus.
On the west coast in particular, we're also apprehensive about the convergence of protected areas and reconciliation. This looks rather like reallocation by zoning without compensation. I'll be clear: we support reconciliation with the indigenous peoples of Canada, but whether it's protection, reconciliation, or both, it can't be on the backs of commercial fishermen and their families, at least one third of whom are indigenous themselves. Fishermen on the west coast, the family businesses in both harvesting and processing that have diversified, adopted cutting-edge practices and technology, and developed new markets and new products, are at risk here. You are all charged with scrutinizing the policy and approach on protected areas. We ask you to do exactly that and to not be swayed by views of fisheries and fish management that apply to other places in the world but not to B.C.
The threats to our oceans are real, but they come from oil and gas exploration, the prospect of seabed mining, and ocean acidification, not fishing for food. Large no-take fishery zones will not help deal with these problems. We are partners in the 5% and 10%, and will always be ready to protect special features.
Closing large areas to fishing off the west coast does little for biodiversity, little for conservation, little for the men and women up and down the coast who work in our sector and who are middle class or aspire to the middle class, and little for the health of Canadians, who deserve access to local, sustainable seafood.
On the west coast, we believe we can have both biodiversity and healthy, sustainable fisheries. Indeed, we have been working with the ENGO community to try to sketch out what that might look like so that we can indeed continue to provide food for Canadians and food for the world.
I really appreciate the chance to speak to you. If I can leave you with one message, it would be this. It's the livelihood of fishermen, my members, that is at stake here, and we need to be part of the process, engaged in looking at exactly where these MPAs will go and reducing the impact so that we can continue to do our job.
Thank you very much, everyone.