Evidence of meeting #71 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 parks.
A recording is available from Parliament.
Liberal
Chief Scientist, Ocean Networks Canada
We know a lot, and we know what we don't know.
Liberal
Ken Hardie Liberal Fleetwood—Port Kells, BC
I know: it's a deep ocean out there.
We just had some folks in here from Parks Canada. It was pointed out to us, especially in the northern portion of our study, that they were doing a very good job of incorporating traditional knowledge along with science. They noted that there's a distinction between trying to fuse traditional knowledge with science or using traditional knowledge as an overlay with science. What are your views on those two ways of proceeding?
Chief Scientist, Ocean Networks Canada
Certainly, particularly if we think about zoning within MPAs that are close to the coastal zone, there I think we have to take advantage of local traditional knowledge to understand, for example, what are important feeding areas for some of the organisms we're trying to protect. I'm thinking particularly of large marine mammals. There, I think traditional knowledge can provide guidance to scientists.
I have the personal experience of having spent 10 days trying to measure ocean currents in an area where all I really had to do, as I discovered on the 11th day, was talk to one of the locals as to the cold water comes in here and then goes around and goes over there.... My instruments only partially answered that question.
So yes, traditional knowledge is vitally important, both for determining boundaries and for making decisions on zoning within these MPAs, particularly if we're trying to protect traditional use of some of the living resources.
Liberal
Ken Hardie Liberal Fleetwood—Port Kells, BC
About a year and a half ago, the government, which was brand new at the time, announced a fairly substantial lift in funding for science. Can you comment at all on what impacts you've seen from that investment so far?
Chief Scientist, Ocean Networks Canada
What I've seen so far is a change of mood at DFO among my DFO colleagues. We are collaborating again and doing research again, and we are mutually excited about how science can contribute to protection of our oceans.
Liberal
Ken Hardie Liberal Fleetwood—Port Kells, BC
You've mentioned that as we increase the number of MPAs we need to increase the monitoring capacity. We've heard that both Parks Canada and DFO provide monitoring and enforcement. We've also heard from some indigenous communities that the guardian program can make a contribution there as well.
Overall, in order of magnitude, especially in looking at side arm-bearing enforcement officers and first nations guardians, how much more of this do we need, do you think?
Chief Scientist, Ocean Networks Canada
I think we need to make a distinction between enforcement and monitoring.
By monitoring, I'm referring to actually monitoring the ecosystems that are present in the MPAs to make sure that we are achieving our conservation objectives. This can involve doing surveys of the abundance of organisms and their general health.
The enforcement part is something else, where we actually have to manage territorial intrusions into the protected area or manage activities that are not allowed within certain zones. I can't really comment on the enforcement part of this.
What I'm trying to make a point about here is the importance of monitoring the ecosystem itself. If something goes wrong, or if we see that things are going in a direction that we don't wish them to, then we need to look at whether this is a result of natural change that we don't understand at all or a result of uncontrolled human intervention.
If I may, I'll make a second point about the critical importance of monitoring to establish a baseline so that we can understand how quickly things can change naturally within a marine protected area. Before we come along a couple of years later and say that “the area wasn't like this two years ago, so who's to blame?”, we really need to get a grasp of the range of natural change in these MPAs and within these ecosystems, and what is outside of what we would normally expect from natural change. We don't really have that baseline in many of these cases.
Closer to the coast, I think we can make use of traditional knowledge for that, but as we move offshore, where we know very little, there we have to use other, more sophisticated tools, mainly technology.
Liberal
Ken Hardie Liberal Fleetwood—Port Kells, BC
I have one more very quick question. You're taking a whole ecosystem approach, then, and not, as we've seen in the past, just focusing on commercially useful stocks?
October 24th, 2017 / 10:20 a.m.
Chief Scientist, Ocean Networks Canada
I'm taking the approach of conserving biodiversity, which is Canada's obligation under the Convention on Biological Diversity, so that's all species and also the protection of the services that an intact ecosystem provides to society.
Liberal
Conservative
Conservative
Mel Arnold Conservative North Okanagan—Shuswap, BC
Thank you, Mr. Chair, and thank you for appearing today, Doctor.
I'll take an excerpt out of your opening statement today, which is that the “creation of offshore and remote MPAs may be easier and more expeditious in that it avoids lengthy and difficult stakeholder interactions related to fisheries”. During the past week, we were in the Maritimes and met with snow crab and lobster fishermen and so on. They were referring to a midshore area. Your statement here seems to indicate that they may not need to be consulted as directly because it's an offshore area.
Chief Scientist, Ocean Networks Canada
No. I'm not saying that they should not be consulted. I am saying that in many cases, in the very deep water offshore, the areas where there are no fisheries of note, the consultation will tend to be rather short, because there are very limited resources there to exploit in a commercial sense. I'm not suggesting that we should not consult anyone. We shouldn't make any assumptions of that sort.
Conservative
Mel Arnold Conservative North Okanagan—Shuswap, BC
Okay. Thank you.
Another statement, for which I'll have to look up the exact wording you had here, was about the north. You said that it may not be “representative of our coastal areas”, yet those are areas that we're looking at for some of these large MPAs. Can you elaborate on what your statement was referring to when you said that it doesn't represent our coastal areas?
Chief Scientist, Ocean Networks Canada
Certainly. I was referring to the Pacific and Atlantic coastal areas in southern Canada, which tend to be the most biodiverse, the most productive, and the most affected by human activities. There are also important coastal areas in the Arctic, but they are not equivalent to what we find further south.
Conservative
Mel Arnold Conservative North Okanagan—Shuswap, BC
You refer to how “DFO does not have the capacity to monitor its existing MPA network” and say that additional funding or additional resources should be allocated with regard to the addition of increased MPA coverage. Where should that funding come from?
Chief Scientist, Ocean Networks Canada
That's a very good question.
First of all, I wanted to make the point that DFO has some capacity to monitor the ecosystems within the MPAs, but to do this on a regular basis, particularly in the remote locations, is really challenging.
Where should funding go? I think that one example we have here is the collaboration between academia and DFO. We are working together to encourage research in marine protected areas, so research dollars are just essentially being redirected. We're not putting more money in the envelope here; rather, we are encouraging partnerships and encouraging researchers to work within MPAs and help DFO, for example, monitor the dynamics of the ecosystems within the MPAs.
Conservative
Mel Arnold Conservative North Okanagan—Shuswap, BC
That leads me to some of the testimony we heard last week in the Maritimes. Commercial fishermen feel that they could be active participants through what some call “citizen science”, their passive observations while at sea. Do you see that as an opportunity to help monitor?
Chief Scientist, Ocean Networks Canada
Absolutely. In fact, we have a citizen science program within Ocean Networks Canada called “community fishers”, in which we provide instruments to fishermen who go offshore to areas that are not covered by our observing network and take regular measurements by lowering instruments to the sea floor using their fishing gear. These are automatically uploaded to our baseline.
There are a lot of different sources of information for monitoring MPAs. I don't think it needs to be strictly DFO or academic scientists who do it, but we do need to coordinate this.
Conservative
Mel Arnold Conservative North Okanagan—Shuswap, BC
Thank you.
There has been a lot of talk recently about how we have three months remaining to meet the 5% target, which means a 40% increase over what's currently protected. That's a 40% increase in the next three months, and then doubling that in the next three years. Do you think of that as an overenthusiastic target in terms of having the proper consultation, the monitoring, and the enforcement?
Conservative
Chief Scientist, Ocean Networks Canada
I would hope that it's not overly ambitious. This is certainly the first point that I tried to make earlier. I was at the International Marine Protected Areas Congress in Chile at the beginning of September. There, you heard time and time again that countries are rushing to meet their CBD deadlines, particularly the 2020 deadline, by creating large offshore MPAs in areas where the whole public consultation process will go more quickly because there is no existing exploitation of either marine or living resources or mineral resources.
I hope we don't do too much of this as we move ahead to try to meet these deadlines. It is important to protect these offshore areas. They are in many ways the most intact and untouched, but at the same time, as I mentioned earlier, they are not equivalent or representative of the more species-rich and productive marine ecosystems that are closer to our coasts. We need a mix of these two.
