Fisheries Committee on May 18th, 2017

[Prof. Isabelle Côté]

I think that in Canada we cannot do this but we need to be able to negotiate extremely minimal takes for these no-take MPAs to actually be effective.

[Bernadette Jordan, Liberal, South Shore—St. Margarets, NS]

My other question for you is with regard to effective enforcement. We've heard, time and time again, throughout this study and others, that enforcement is lacking, that DFO doesn't have the resources necessary to enforce a lot of the concerns that we have. Do you see that as an ongoing problem within DFO or is that something you can even comment on?

[Prof. Isabelle Côté]

It is an ongoing problem.

[Bernadette Jordan, Liberal, South Shore—St. Margarets, NS]

Thank you.

I'm going to go to Dr. Roberts. I thought your testimony was extremely interesting when you talked about your paper parks and the 20%, because of course England has been held up as a model of what we should be doing. Then you said that 10% is a political win.

Would it be better to have 10% of an actual MPA that works or 20% of paper parks?

[Prof. Callum Roberts]

This is a question that I think there are divided opinions on and largely that comes down to tactics. I think that some people feel that it's a good idea to put the protected areas out there and then once there is a protected area there is a legal requirement for it to actually do something. It's an opportunity to hold whoever's in charge's feet to the fire and say, “Look, you've set up this protected area and it should be working and why isn't it? You haven't resourced it properly. There's nobody monitoring it. There's no enforcement, or whatever, or there's even no management plan.” I would say that most English MPAs fail for lack of ambition to begin with. It's not just that they don't have the resources to implement the management plan. There are no management plans either. There is no ambition to recover things that have been depleted.

We really need to go back to the drawing board here. What we do have overseas are some fantastic marine protected areas. The Chagos Marine Protected Area in the Indian Ocean is fully protected and covers something like 600,000 square kilometres. The Pitcairn Islands MPA has just been established; that too, is fully no take. On Ascension Island, half of that exclusive economic zone there is also to be fully no take. We're doing it right overseas and that's under the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, but we're not doing it right in our domestic nearshore waters.

To go back to your question, I think if it were just that the MPAs were to remain unmanaged and paper parks, I would want the well-managed smaller area to be the one that we had. Otherwise, you have nothing at all.

[Bernadette Jordan, Liberal, South Shore—St. Margarets, NS]

You did say that the 30 in Scotland were actually doing a little bit better than the 15 in England.

[Prof. Callum Roberts]

Yes.

[Bernadette Jordan, Liberal, South Shore—St. Margarets, NS]

You also mentioned the mobile fishing gear, that it's a difference in the way that they fish. Are any of those areas in Scotland no-take zones?

[Prof. Callum Roberts]

There's only one that is fully no take, and it's tiny. It's a couple of square kilometres. We've been studying it in great detail for the last six or seven years or so, and we've been looking at the recovery of life in that protected area.

In the long haul, more and more fully protected marine reserves will be established in both Scotland and England. Eventually, the regulators will catch up with the science and will start to implement that level of protection. The proposals in Scotland that initially came out from management were dreadful. They were proposing to continue with bottom trawling and scallop dredging within about 90% of the area of the MPAs. What's the point of having an MPA if you're just going to carry on trashing it?

Luckily the environmental lobby is pretty strong in Scotland, and it managed to push back on that, so there's a lot more protection there than there is elsewhere in the U.K.

[Bernadette Jordan, Liberal, South Shore—St. Margarets, NS]

Thank you.

I'm going to go to Dr. Worm now.

With regard to the Gully, you said that it's an extremely successful MPA. It's 14 years old now. Is it a no-take zone? I'm sorry; I should know that.

[Prof. Boris Worm]

It's not strictly no take. As you saw from the graph I showed, there are hardly any no-take areas in Canadian MPAs. However, it does not permit bottom-touching gear that could destroy the corals that are the target of the MPA. Also, they only allow fishing in an area that is not frequented by the bottlenose whales, which are the other target of the MPA. It has been successful in maintaining the population of bottlenose whales and the corals that were the targets of the MPA. It was not done for fisheries management purposes. I believe the fisheries effects have not been studied, although they should be. That wasn't part of the original objective.

[Bernadette Jordan, Liberal, South Shore—St. Margarets, NS]

So—

[The Chair, Liberal, Scott Simms]

Thank you, Ms. Jordan. I'm sure you'll have another chance.

Next we have Mr. Sopuck, author of the book, A Life Outdoors, which you can probably pick up on Amazon.

You have seven minutes, please.

[Robert Sopuck, Conservative, Dauphin—Swan River—Neepawa, MB]

Thank you very much.

Dr. Worm, I was a little taken aback by your phrase “special interest groups”, referring to the fishing community. There are four million anglers in Canada, and I would argue that those four million anglers represent much of the entire country. We are not a special interest group. We are the fabric of society. In B.C. alone, there are 300,000 anglers who fish in the tidal waters. I think we have to be careful about terminology—and I haven't even talked about the food fishery in Newfoundland.

Dr. Worm, is it by necessity that MPAs would have to be in waters within a nation's 200-mile limit? Is it essentially impossible to set up an MPA in international waters?

[Prof. Boris Worm]

The answer to that is no. It is possible to set up MPAs in international waters, and there are a few examples: the OSPAR areas on the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, set up by various regional fishing management organizations and other intergovernmental organizations. So it is possible to do something on the high seas. In fact, there is a proposal that's being seriously discussed to make the entire high seas an MPA, and, as such, realize large fisheries benefits for individual countries' EEZs, including the Canadian one.

Let me apologize for saying “special interest group”. I should have just said “interest group”. These are groups that have an interest in a particular aspect of ocean governance, and I didn't mean to—

[Robert Sopuck, Conservative, Dauphin—Swan River—Neepawa, MB]

That's fair. Thanks.

Your comment on the international waters.... I came across an article in The New York Times called “China's Appetite Pushes Fisheries to the Brink”. China has some 2,600 vessels right now, and they are subsidized to the tune of $22 billion a year. The tragedy that's unfolding off the west coast of Africa is truly horrific in terms of the loss of fish stocks. I think these international MPAs are desperately required in some areas, but I think making them work in the face of this kind of fishing pressure and subsidization by quite a rapacious government will make it extremely difficult.

[Prof. Boris Worm]

Could I comment on that very quickly?

[Robert Sopuck, Conservative, Dauphin—Swan River—Neepawa, MB]

Yes, real quickly.

[Prof. Boris Worm]

We've done research on that very issue. I fully agree with you that the situation is dire in much of the high seas. However, we have a new tool to globally monitor our fisheries worldwide. We wrote a paper in Science on this last year called “Ending hide and seek at sea”. The tool is called an automatic identification system, which allows us to track fishing vessels in real time and see foreign overfishing in distant waters, for example, off West Africa.

[Robert Sopuck, Conservative, Dauphin—Swan River—Neepawa, MB]

Dr. Côté, honestly, I think you should stick to your guns on no take. No take means no take by everybody. The courts have been quite clear that conservation comes first when we consider fisheries allocation.

In your view, does catch-and-release angling count as no take? Hooking mortality in catch-and-release fishing is sometimes as high as 5%. With the Atlantic salmon and the white sturgeon, however, it's zero. In your world, does no take include catch-and-release angling?

[Prof. Isabelle Côté]

Definitely, I will stick to my guns. The disturbance caused by catch-and-release should not be occurring in no-take areas. If there's any associated mortality, we want to eliminate any kind of disturbance in these areas.

[Robert Sopuck, Conservative, Dauphin—Swan River—Neepawa, MB]

Naturally, we will agree to strongly disagree on that point.

I would like to talk about the California experience with MPAs. Witness Phil Morlock from the Canadian Sportfishing Industry Association knows the California situation very well. The authorities very cleverly carved out, according to the sportfishing groups, all of the best angling areas, leaving the marginal areas for the anglers. The ensuing disruption to local economies was dramatic in boat and pickup truck sales, angling gear, guiding, and outfitting. Mr. Morlock presented figures on it, so this is not just an opinion.

How do we avoid cherry-picking the best areas and leaving behind second-rate fishing areas for everybody else?

[Prof. Isabelle Côté]

I wasn't part of the California experience and I haven't followed what happened there. I'm sure in the research the committee has done you've heard about programs like Marxan, which allow you to plan. Programs like that allow you to find the optimal compromise between protection of areas that have lots of biodiversity and areas that are used a lot by various groups. It is possible to close areas that optimally fulfill the goals of protecting biodiversity while minimizing conflict with users.

In respect of MPAs, we're not talking about closing all the best areas. There has to be protection and some access to good areas, and at the end of the day it is a compromise.

[Robert Sopuck, Conservative, Dauphin—Swan River—Neepawa, MB]

Dr. Worm, the shipping interests have come before us in other meetings and said that important shipping lanes need to be protected during the creation of MPAs. Can commercial shipping coexist with MPAs?

[Prof. Boris Worm]

It can, but special care must be taken as it was in the Bay of Fundy, where shipping lanes were rerouted at minimal cost to the shipping industry but with maximum benefit to the endangered marine life that use that area as a critical habitat. Mortality has decreased by over 90%, and I believe the additional travel time is three minutes for the ships. It can be done but it takes careful planning.