Fisheries Committee on June 8th, 2017

[James Bezan, Conservative, Selkirk—Interlake—Eastman, MB]

I move that the rest of the meeting take place in public so we can discuss the special request of four members under Standing Order 106(4).

(Motion agreed to)

[The Chair, Liberal, Scott Simms]

Done. We will be in public.

We'll take just a couple of minutes' break. Perhaps you would like to see what was exhibited earlier by Dr. Leys.

[The Chair, Liberal, Scott Simms]

Okay, folks, welcome back.

This is the second session, which is public, regarding committee business.

Mr. Bezan.

[James Bezan, Conservative, Selkirk—Interlake—Eastman, MB]

Mr. Chair, we have a special request, under Standing Order 106(4), and I'd like to move that motion:

That the committee hold a briefing with the Deputy Minister of Fisheries and Oceans on the issues surrounding closures to Canadian Coast Guard stations in Gimli, Manitoba, Selkirk, Manitoba, and Kenora, Ontario, in addition to cuts made to the search and rescue dive program in British Columbia and cuts to the Salmonid Enhancement Program.

[The Chair, Liberal, Scott Simms]

If you could just give us 30 seconds, Mr. Bezan, we're going to distribute that.

First of all, by a show of hands, may I see who's interested in speaking to this particular motion?

Oh, my. Okay.

Mr. Hardie, I saw you before, and then I'll go down this way.

[James Bezan, Conservative, Selkirk—Interlake—Eastman, MB]

I have the floor. I moved the motion.

[The Chair, Liberal, Scott Simms]

I'm just trying to line up who's speaking, so it's Mr. Hardie, and Mr. Sopuck, and then down that way.

Mr. Bezan, you're up.

[James Bezan, Conservative, Selkirk—Interlake—Eastman, MB]

In the motion, there is one extra word I inserted after “Selkirk”, namely, “Manitoba”, so make sure that is noted in the minutes.

I want to call to everyone's attention that this affects my riding directly. It really impacts Manitoba, especially Winnipeg. The Coast Guard station at Gimli and the Coast Guard stations at Selkirk and Kenora really do serve the public. A lot of people have secondary residences on Lake Winnipeg, and Lake of the Woods at Kenora, and they enjoy boating, enjoy the waters.

I'd like to make sure everybody is aware, first and foremost, that Lake of the Woods is an international waterway. It occupies parts of the Canadian provinces of Ontario and Manitoba and the State of Minnesota in the U.S. This is an international waterway, and the Coast Guard is there to provide support to the RCMP and to Canada Border Services Agency in the transit of people back and forth over the lake. In Selkirk and Kenora, the Coast Guard stations are responsible for putting out navigational aids, including markers of difficult channels, rapids, and other hazards in the waterway.

The Red River and Lake Winnipeg are both recognized as federal navigable waters. The Coast Guard stations in these locations have been there for over four decades, and the Gimli Coast Guard station provides very important safety provisions as well as search and rescue services for people on the lake.

A lot of you may not be familiar with Lake Winnipeg, which is in my riding. Lake Winnipeg is an inland ocean, and its waters are very dangerous. It responds to wind and often has waves six to 10 feet high. People have perished on the lake as recently as a couple of weeks ago. We have to have Coast Guard there to provide safety to our commercial fishers. There are 23 small craft harbours on Lake Winnipeg that fall under the purview of DFO. There are over 1,000 commercial fishing families who earn their living off that lake. Northern communities are served by the lake's commercial fishing businesses, and during the summer all their freight, all their goods, come in from the lake. There are lake freighters that move all their goods. Until recently, even ferry services were still going on the north basin.

There is a need to have Coast Guard support for that type of civilian movement as well as for recreational boaters. We're talking sailboats; there are yacht clubs up and down the south basin. We need to make sure that those people have the required level of safety.

The Gimli station has just started to benefit from a reinvestment program announced in 2015. Over $2 million has already been spent on the construction of two new buildings. A third building is now under way; the foundation is poured, and they just have to erect it. Its purpose is to provide storage facilities for fuel, for navigational markers, boats, and accommodations for the Coast Guard staff who are flown in for respite from other areas of Canada. We have to make sure this money is not just thrown away.

It is my understanding that both the Kenora and Selkirk stations may be closed as of today, with the buoys still out there. There have been no communications with the RCMP or provincial governments about who is going to pick up these services and how they're going to be delivered.

Finally, I'd just note that situated at 17 Wing Winnipeg is 435 Squadron, which is made up of search and rescue technicians for the central region. Their area of responsibility extends from the U.S. border in central Canada, through Manitoba, and right up into the Arctic. Those SAR techs train on Lake Winnipeg twice a week, either diving or jumping in. Canadian Armed Forces protocol is that a SAR tech cannot train unless there is Coast Guard search and rescue within one hour of where they're conducting their training. If we lose search and rescue out of the Coast Guard station in Gimli, there will no longer be training done from 17 Wing. Everyone will have to be moved to Comox in British Columbia.

Therefore, I'd ask that everyone support this motion to ensure that we get the proper briefing and understanding of why the government wants to make these cuts.

[The Chair, Liberal, Scott Simms]

Thank you, Mr. Bezan.

Very quickly, folks, the witness testimony went five minutes beyond the scheduled time, pardon me, because I like to be a bit flexible. Could I have unanimous consent to extend this meeting by five minutes to compensate for the witness testimony? Am I seeing unanimous consent?

[An hon. member]

No more than five minutes.

[The Chair, Liberal, Scott Simms]

Very quickly, Mr. Hardie.

[Ken Hardie, Liberal, Fleetwood—Port Kells, BC]

Yes, I regret that, but I do have another committee and preparations to do.

I lived in Kenora and fished in Lake of the Woods. I lived in southern Manitoba and fished in Lake Winnipeg. I too want to hear what's going on and why, and certainly as a resident of the west coast, I think the developments there also require some answers. We want to find out what's going on.

Having said that, though, the position that I would personally take, and I think the position of this side, is that this motion is a good idea and well intended, but unnecessary. We have the supplementary (A)s coming up, I believe, next Thursday, the 15th, which will give us an opportunity to canvass these issues with the officials we need to speak with. As such, this is probably redundant at this point.

Sure, we'll entertain your arguments to the contrary, if there are any.

Thank you.

[The Chair, Liberal, Scott Simms]

Mr. Sopuck.

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

Yes, I appreciate Mr. Hardie's sentiment. On the surface, what he says makes sense. However, this is a very complicated issue.

Also, this committee has set precedents in the past. With the Canfisco fish plant, we interrupted our program to spend a day on that, and on the Comox situation, I think we had two meetings. This particular meeting that we are requesting, a stand-alone meeting, is very consistent with what this committee has done in the past.

This is the first time this side of the committee has asked for anything like this. As a Manitoban myself, I can't overemphasize how dangerous Lake Winnipeg is. It's a shallow lake. The waves kick up. There are also lots of cottagers. Its proximity to Winnipeg means it's very highly used. The aboriginal communities on the east side of Lake Winnipeg absolutely require those vessels to service their communities, and those vessels need the support of the Coast Guard.

This is a pretty significant issue, and very much along the lines of the Comox issue we studied before, so I would request that we do this in a separate meeting and have a fulsome discussion of the issue.

[The Chair, Liberal, Scott Simms]

Mr. Arnold.

[Mel Arnold, Conservative, North Okanagan—Shuswap, BC]

Mr. Chair, I don't agree with Mr. Hardie's statement that we could cover this with the supplementary estimates meeting. This is going to take more than one two-hour meeting, I believe. There's so much involved here, with the restoration resource unit, the salmon enhancement program, and the Coast Guard dive teams.

We saw the instance on the west coast of B.C., I believe it was in 2001 or 2002, where a fishing vessel capsized at the mouth of the Fraser River. Coast Guard divers had to wait 45 minutes for approval. They were on site, but they had to wait for 45 minutes for approval to go into the water. The people on that boat drowned. There's a high probability that they were still in an air space and could have been rescued had the dive team been able to go in sooner. This is cutting that dive team. This is going to cause life-threatening situations where the divers will not be able to enter the water without their approval.

I also want to stress that's not the only important part of this request for this meeting. I took part in a resource restoration program last fall, just before we came back from our summer time in our constituencies. We had two DFO officers guide 30 volunteers, restoring a river channel that had flattened out on a delta so thin that the water was only two inches deep and the massive chinook salmon could not get back up. We spent part of a morning and an afternoon with burlap and fence pegs restoring that river to a channel that became over a foot deep. Those fish would otherwise have been stranded in the lake and unable to reproduce, further impacting our salmon populations on the west coast.

That was just one simple operation for a day or two with those two DFO officers. The cuts that are being made here are absolutely unconscionable. We've heard that our Conservative government made cuts to DFO over and over again. This is unbelievable. We've heard from constituents, from conservation organizations, from schoolteachers who have had salmon tanks in their classrooms for decades, who are absolutely outraged by what is being done with these cuts. To try to fit them into one meeting with the supplementary estimates would be doing an injustice to what's being done here.

[The Chair, Liberal, Scott Simms]

Mr. Donnelly.

[Fin Donnelly, NDP, Port Moody—Coquitlam, BC]

Mr. Chair, I want to add my comments to the call for at least a stand-alone meeting. I think it's absolutely critical that we have at least one meeting to address the issues brought forward by this motion. I think Mr. Bezan has clearly spelled out the impacts of the Coast Guard cuts on Manitoba and Ontario.

To add to Mr. Arnold's comments about the loss of the dive team in the RRU on the west coast, I'll just add my comments about the loss of the salmonids in the classroom program. Over one million students have gone through—one million students in 40 years—and this program is being eliminated. I have heard, and I know many B.C. MPs have heard, as Mr. Arnold is saying, from teachers, from students, from parents, and from stewards right across the Province of British Columbia how upset they are with this decision. That's one small program of the salmon enhancement program that's being affected here.

We have the dive team, which is a completely specialized unit in the Coast Guard. It goes in for recovery. I know there's been talk of other federal agencies like the RCMP being able to pick up the slack or the city dive squad being able to do this. The RCMP goes in for recovery. The unit of the Coast Guard has specialized equipment and training to prevent deaths. It goes in there to prevent deaths. Mr. Arnold referenced the incident that happened, I believe, in the early 2000s, in 2001, in which a car went into the Fraser River, on Sea Island. It was right by the Coast Guard base. Of course, they had already cut the dive team. The Coast Guard was right there, on the incident, with the submerged vehicle. The occupants most likely were alive. However, they couldn't go in because they didn't have the specialized unit. They had to wait for the RCMP dive team to come. It took over an hour, and, of course, it was a recovery. They were extracting bodies at that point.

There was a huge outcry. Mr. Dhaliwal was the minister at the time. The community was outraged and let him know that. He was the minister, and the decision was reversed. Now, 15 years later, we're looking at cutting exactly the same thing. Have we not learned from a past mistake?

I agree with Mr. Arnold and Mr. Bezan. We need at least one dedicated meeting. I don't think, to Mr. Hardie's point, we can cover it under supplementary estimates, for which we have so many other issues that we have to talk about.

I fully support this motion. Thank you.

[The Chair, Liberal, Scott Simms]

Thank you, Mr. Donnelly.

Are there any more comments on this particular motion?

I see none, so we now go to a vote.

[James Bezan, Conservative, Selkirk—Interlake—Eastman, MB]

Could we have a recorded vote?

[The Chair, Liberal, Scott Simms]

Mr. Arnold, you wished to add something?

[Mel Arnold, Conservative, North Okanagan—Shuswap, BC]

I would like to make an amendment to the motion in the first line, “That the committee hold a briefing with a series of meetings...”, so that we don't get limited to just a half-hour meeting or a half-hour briefing with the minister. This needs to be, “That the committee hold a briefing consisting of a series of meetings with the Deputy Minister of Fisheries and Ocean...”.

[The Chair, Liberal, Scott Simms]

Just give us 30 seconds to make sure we get your amendment right.

By the way, I forgot to mention that Standing Order 106(4) was triggered by four letters received from members of this committee—Mr. Arnold, Mr. Doherty, Mr. Donnelly, and Mr. Sopuck—to which we had five days...so we fall well within that range. An amendment was just put forward by Mr. Arnold. I won't read the whole motion, but it says, “That the committee hold a briefing”, and Mr. Arnold inserts “consisting of a series of meetings” and then it continues on with “with the Deputy Minister of Fisheries and Oceans...”.

Is there any discussion on that?

(Amendment negatived)

We now go to the main motion, as put forward by Mr. Bezan.

[James Bezan, Conservative, Selkirk—Interlake—Eastman, MB]

Could we have a recorded vote?

[The Chair, Liberal, Scott Simms]

We will have a recorded vote indeed.

(Motion negatived: nays 5; yeas 4)

The motion has been defeated.

We are now at 10:46 a.m., a little bit over.

Thank you, folks.

We stand adjourned until Tuesday of next week.