Fisheries Committee on Nov. 30th, 2017

[The Chair, Liberal, Scott Simms]

Good morning, everyone.

Pursuant to the order of reference of Tuesday, October 17, we are studying Bill C-55, An Act to amend the Oceans Act and the Canada Petroleum Resources Act, after successfully going past second reading.

First of all, I want to say hello to our guests who are here with us today, not our witnesses but our colleagues. We have Mr. Stetski again. Mr. Blaine Calkins is also joining us today. Last but not least is Mr. Robert Sopuck. Thank you for joining us.

Now let's go to our guests.

We are joined this morning by video conference by an associate professor from the school of environmental studies, University of Victoria. Dr. Natalie Ban. We also have Dr. Rodolphe Devillers, professor, department of geography, Memorial University of Newfoundland. Last but not least, again, a gentleman we know and who certainly is no stranger to this committee, whose name also comes up quite a bit, is Dr. Boris Worm, professor of biology, Dalhousie University.

Thank you to all our witnesses for getting up this morning and joining us at this early hour, especially Dr. Ban. It's viciously early on the west coast.

As you know, we do up to 10 minutes for opening statements, and then we start with our colleagues asking questions.

Dr. Ban, would you please start.

[Dr. Natalie Ban, Associate Professor, School of Environmental Studies, University of Victoria, As an Individual]

Good morning. It's an honour to have been invited to present to you today.

I've been working on the science of marine conservation for about the past 14 years, with a focus on the design and effectiveness of marine protected areas, or MPAs. I also presented to this committee back in May about MPAs. Thanks for having me again.

Today I'm going to reflect on the proposed amendments and recommend some additional changes to the Oceans Act. I'll mention some scientific evidence supporting my comments, and I'll follow up with a written submission that includes the peer-reviewed scientific papers that support my point.

First of all, I'd like to commend this government for the proposed amendments outlined in Bill C-55 to improve the Oceans Act. I support the main changes that the bill would make to the Oceans Act. In particular, adding interim measures or freezing the footprint is very important so that consultations about studies, and studies about proposed MPAs, can take place without additional ecosystem degradation.

Clarifying fines and enhancing enforcement capacity are very welcome, especially in creating the opportunity to provide a role for indigenous guardians. Amendments to the Canada Petroleum Resources Act would allow the minister to prohibit new oil and gas activities and cancel existing interests. This is excellent because oil and gas activities are inherently unsustainable and not compatible with biodiversity conservation. Similar amendments would be needed for the accord acts to allow for a consistent approach across Canada.

Finally, having the precautionary principle enhanced in the act is also a great step forward.

I'd like to make five key additional recommendations for changes to the Oceans Act that would once again make Canada a leader in this area, as it was when the Oceans Act was first created.

The first of these is to add minimum protection standards to the Oceans Act. I know the committee has already heard from many witnesses about the importance of minimum protection standards. I won't belabour this point but wanted to add my support and one additional point. Opportunities to amend acts do not come up very often, and hence it would be a missed opportunity to delay discussing minimum protection standards. Also, there's a fear that not having minimum standards would lead to a decline in protections throughout Canada's protected area systems, on land and in the sea.

I'm a director on the board of the Canadian Council on Ecological Areas, a not-for-profit organization that facilitates and assists Canadians with the establishment and management of the comprehensive network of protected areas that are representative of Canada's terrestrial and aquatic natural diversity. On the board are federal, provincial, and jurisdictional representatives who work on protected areas in those jurisdictions, and some others who are academics like me. Those working in terrestrial jurisdictions fear that weak protection in the ocean could have the unintended consequence of lowering the bar for protections on land as well.

My second recommendation is to add a requirement for fully protected zones. You've also heard about this already, and there's documented scientific support for biodiversity benefits of strongly protected MPAs. My own recent work shows that MPAs that permit varying levels of fishing and other damaging activities are less effective at biodiversity conservation than are fully protected areas. Fully protected MPAs are also needed so that we can understand the impact of fishing and other activities on marine ecosystems. In other words, they can become a control site for understanding the impacts that humans have on the ocean.

My third recommendation is to add the ability to establish networks. As you know, best practice in MPA design is to establish networks rather than individual MPAs, and indeed many regions in Canada are working toward this. Thus encouraging establishment of networks of MPAs also means recognizing that representation is a legitimate and indeed essential rationale for MPAs. The Oceans Act should facilitate implementation of networks of MPAs by having provisions to establish a network rather than having to do each MPA in a network individually.

My fourth recommendation is to add a mechanism for co-management with indigenous peoples and recognize indigenous protected areas. There's an unprecedented opportunity to use MPAs to work toward reconciliation with indigenous peoples. There's a grave concern about the state of the oceans among the indigenous peoples I've worked with, and a keen interest to explore MPAs to engage in marine management. Joint management of MPAs, or co-management, means sharing of power equally, and this is seen as an opportunity both to revitalize cultural practices and to recover culturally important species.

The Oceans Act can provide for true joint management of indigenous marine territories on a nation-to-nation basis where desired by indigenous peoples. The planning toward a network of MPAs in the northern shelf bioregion in British Columbia is a great step in that direction. If done in partnership with indigenous peoples, MPAs can provide ecological conservation, cultural opportunities, and food security, and play a role in reconciliation. Additionally, the Oceans Act should also be amended to explicitly recognize indigenous-led protected and community conserved areas. Currently there is no legal tool for implementing marine indigenous protected areas. Those areas would rest decision-making with indigenous peoples.

My final recommendation for an addition to the Oceans Act is to ensure sufficient funding to manage and enforce MPAs. Implementing MPAs is only the beginning of managing our oceans for protection of biodiversity. Once established, MPAs need resources and staffing to ensure that they are managed properly, including enforcement, education, and outreach. A recent study found that MPAs with adequate staff capacity had an effect almost three times greater than that of MPAs with inadequate capacity. The rockfish conservation areas, or RCAs, in B.C. are illustrative. While they're not MPAs, they have a similar spatial management mechanism.

About a quarter of people interviewed in a recent study by one of my students admitted to unintentionally fishing illegally inside these rockfish conservation areas. The main reason for this non-compliance was lack of knowledge. About a quarter of the people had never heard that these places existed, and less than 1% knew all the rules of permitted and prohibited activities inside those areas. Most had never seen an enforcement officer, and this is in the southern Gulf Islands region in southern British Columbia, which is very populated. Outreach and education are thus essential for successful MPAs. Enforcement officers, be they DFO or other designated parties, need to have the resources to do their jobs properly or these areas will not protect biodiversity.

Another important resourcing issue is to compensate ocean users for lost livelihood opportunities, and not just oil and gas, as currently in the bill. This point was brought home to me by my terrestrial colleagues on the Canadian Council on Ecological Areas board, who work on protected area establishment and management federally, provincially, and in the territories. Compensation is simply an everyday reality for a terrestrial protected area establishment. Agencies buy land, compensate timber licence-holders, forgive property and capital taxes, while land trusts buy land, issue charitable gift receipts, and even buy out subsurface rights, and the Canada Revenue Agency writes off tax revenue, all to facilitate protected area establishment.

A key benefit ecologically is that, if you have such compensation or a structural adjustment, it can facilitate better protection of better sites. The political reality is that it's hard to achieve community support for well-protected MPAs where they are most needed because of the fear of loss of livelihoods. Communities can't always look past the near-term negative impacts to the potential long-term benefits. Compensation thus embodies an implicit recognition that protected areas benefit all of us, but sometimes put a disproportionate burden on a few.

One model that's worked well to engage communities in conservation-related activities is the coast fund in the Great Bear Rainforest, which provides a funding source for activities that support a sustainable economy in conservation. A similar fund could be established in regions where MPA networks support indigenous and non-indigenous coastal-dependent communities' engagement in marine conservation.

I thank you for the opportunity to present to you today, and I look forward to your questions.

[The Chair, Liberal, Scott Simms]

Dr. Ban, thank you very much.

Colleagues, we're now, quite literally, going practically halfway around the world, if you consider Victoria to St. John's, Newfoundland, halfway around the world. Some would, and I am one of them.

Dr. Devillers, you have up to 10 minutes, please.

[Professor Rodolphe Devillers, Professor, Department of Geography, Memorial University of Newfoundland, As an Individual]

Thank you, Mr. Chair and members of the committee, for the invitation to contribute to your study on the proposed amendments to the Oceans Act and the Canada Petroleum Resources Act.

I am a professor of geography at Memorial University of Newfoundland. I've been a scientist for about 20 years, specializing in geographic methods that can help us to understand and manage our oceans. One of my areas of expertise is conservation science, specifically the design of marine protected areas and area networks, and the assessment of their effectiveness.

When I testified in front of this committee last June, I was also in Ottawa for a workshop that focused on this exact topic: potential revisions to the Oceans Act. This workshop involved representatives from Fisheries and Oceans Canada, from the Canadian industry, and from environmental non-profit organizations. A lot of excellent recommendations came out of this workshop, and I strongly encourage you to review the report that was recently released by one of the organizers, the West Coast Environmental Law Association.

Let me start my statements by reiterating a warning I gave you in my previous testimony. Do not confuse the goal of meeting the Aichi 10% target with the real goal of protecting marine biodiversity. They can be very different things. As a matter of fact, a paper published only two weeks ago by Dr. Venter, a scientist at the University of Northern British Columbia, has shown that, globally, terrestrial protected areas tend to be placed in locations characterized by little economic value, and fail to protect areas that show high concentrations of threatened species. Canada's oceans are no exception to this trend, including a lot of areas that contributed to the recent 5% interim target.

We often put MPAs in places of low economic value and are not ready to make the hard choices required to make it right. Our government cannot only be driven by an area-based target. It needs to monitor Canada's progress using a more complex set of metrics.

Marine protected areas have been shown to be a useful management tool to help maintain healthy oceans. I understand the concerns some members of this committee shared about impacts on the economy and employment. Those are valid concerns, but let me remind you what happens when ocean health is not maintained.

In 1992, over 20,000 people from Newfoundland and Labrador were put out of work due to the cod moratorium—20,000 people. This was the single largest mass layoff in Canadian history. This is what happens when decisions favour short-term growth over long-term sustainability. The health of our oceans is declining globally, including in Canada. We have to make sure that what happened in Newfoundland and Labrador will not happen again, and effective marine protected areas have an important role to play in this.

With regard to Bill C-55, you may remember the letter that I co-signed last June with all the marine scientists from across the country, including Dr. Ban and Dr. Worm, who are present today. This letter was sent to Ministers LeBlanc and McKenna.

Our first recommendation was to amend the Oceans Act to include minimum protection levels for MPAs, similar to terrestrial parks. I cannot overstate how important it is to review the Oceans Act in more depth. While the Oceans Act was novel legislation 20 years ago, it has many gaps that have to be filled if we want Canadian MPAs to be useful for protecting marine ecosystems and biodiversity.

The changes proposed in Bill C-55 are a good start and aim to help the government meet its targets, but those changes are not sufficient in the long term. I will focus on four main areas I think should be addressed.

First, the Oceans Act should start by providing a clearer definition of what an MPA is. As mentioned in my earlier testimony, I believe the only logical choice would be to adopt the existing definition from the International Union for Conservation of Nature, IUCN, the international authority on the topic.

The Oceans Act should explicitly list activities that should be prohibited in all Canadian Oceans Act MPAs, something mentioned by Dr. Ban in her last testimony. This is what has been called “minimum standards”. Minister LeBlanc, I believe, is establishing an advisory committee on this topic. I hope that academic scientists with expertise on MPAs will be involved in this process to help review the scientific evidence that supports this advice.

There are already many recommendations from the IUCN that could be explored, and there is no shortage of literature on negative impacts from many human activities on the marine environments. Possible activities that can be reviewed include oil and gas activities, bottom trawling, and seabed mining.

My first point is that the Oceans Act, like the Canada National Parks Act, should require MPAs to maintain ecological integrity. In short, they should be considered marine parks. The Oceans Act should also require a minimum amount of no-take areas for each individual MPA and for the entire network, in order to reflect international recommendations.

My earlier testimony was supported by a number of scientific studies demonstrating that no-take areas tend to provide much higher benefits to marine ecosystems.

Finally, and this may be my most important point, the Oceans Act should have a clear process to support adaptive management of those MPAs. Once created, Oceans Act MPAs are generally not modified, even in cases where there is ample scientific evidence that an MPA does not work in its current design. We need to learn, and we need to leave room for improvements. The current culture and context makes those changes very hard to make in practice.

A study published earlier this year by the World Wildlife Fund of Canada showed that half of Canadian species have declined over the past 45 years. Those species have declined by 83% on average. This is alarming and clearly shows that current management measures are not sufficient to prevent this rapid decline in Canadian wildlife. As mentioned by Kevin Stringer, associate deputy minister for Fisheries and Oceans Canada, during our workshop, this is a once-in-a-generation opportunity to advance ocean protection and management. I strongly encourage you not to miss it.

Thank you for the opportunity to present my view on the key challenges I see with the Oceans Act and the Canada Petroleum Resources Act. I look forward to your questions.

[The Chair, Liberal, Scott Simms]

Thank you, Dr. Devillers.

We now go slightly west of you, to Halifax.

Dr. Worm, you've been here before, so please don't be nervous. Thank you again for joining us.

[Dr. Boris Worm, Professor, Biology, Dalhousie University, As an Individual]

Thank you, Chair, and my thanks to the committee for inviting me again to talk to this panel.

As I had presented in May, I wanted to take a slightly different angle today. I always enjoy showing a piece of data, because it gives us a grounding in which our discussion can be based.

I want you to look at the second slide of my presentation, “Human impacts on land and in the sea”. This is a map that was created last week, and this is the first time that, at a very fine spatial resolution of about 50 kilometres by 50 kilometres, we can map out all human impacts on the land and the sea. If you will, it's the environmental footprint that human activity has on land and sea.

I want you to notice two things. One is that, in the ocean, when you overlay our impacts—and this includes various impacts, from fishing to oil and gas to mining, and even to climate change and pollution—they tend to be much more evenly distributed than on land. On land, they tend to be more spatially concentrated in the areas where lots of people live. In the ocean, we have them more spread out, and that requires a different conservation strategy.

The second thing I want you to notice is that, in the ocean, there are very few places that have low impact, in contrast to land. In the ocean, most places have medium to high impacts, necessitating protecting the biological and socio-economic assets we have in the ocean against damage.

Although we have, for the first time, this unprecedented spatial detail that allows us to intelligently plan our use of the ocean, we have great uncertainty about what those impacts have been for those assets we're trying to protect. Because of that uncertainty, that is the very reason we need a global insurance policy to protect those assets. Just as we insure any other valuable assets we have, we need to do the same with the ocean.

Marine protected areas or other spatial management that effectively removes certain impacts from the ocean, or constrains them in sensitive areas, forms such an insurance policy. As you can see from the map on the next slide, Canada is still lagging behind in contributing to that insurance policy. Fortunately, we have made a commitment internationally to protecting 10% by 2020, and so to catch up with the rest of the world.

If you will allow me to bring this analogy of an insurance policy a little further, you may want to consider the next slide, where I list the key traits of an effective and reputable insurance policy like one you would personally choose for your home or car. This policy would be timely. It would allow you to insure your car as soon as you buy it. It would, of course, be cost-effective, as you are trying to minimize cost. You are trying to have it be comprehensive, so that all possible damages, such as liability for injuring others or damage to your car are covered.

You will want to have a well-managed and reputable company, staffed and funded to do the job of insuring your assets. You want it to be transparent and to have clear standards. You want to know exactly what you are signing.

Also, the very reason we sign an insurance policy is so that it accounts for the inherent uncertainty we all encounter in living our lives. Whether or not your house will burn down is very uncertain—it's actually extremely unlikely—yet we buy house insurance to prepare for that uncertain case.

What makes Bill C-55 effective, or what would make it even more effective? Building on this analogy, I think it allows the MPA process to be timely. Therefore, as soon as we find out that an area has large biological value, and/or that biological value or that asset is unduly threatened or harmed by various activities, we can take steps to protect it. That's a very important feature.

What's the most cost-effective approach of pursuing marine conservation? It's to protect large areas of biological value. In terms of economies of scale, it's more cost-effective to protect larger areas than smaller areas, and the 10% target allows just that.

It has to be comprehensive. Drs. Ban and Devillers brought up that a network or ecosystem approach to planning, not a piecemeal protective approach, would be very advantageous to having a comprehensive plan. This currently is not explicitly stated in the Oceans Act.

We talked about properly resourcing these to make it well managed. That's clearly something that still has to be improved, but what Bill C-55 offers is that it makes the whole affair more transparent by establishing clear ground rules and processes for establishing MPAs. However, we're still, as the other speakers have pointed out, missing minimum standards that we would demand from any insurance policy that we personally purchase. Finally, there is accounting for uncertainty, again the very reason we are doing this, and I was extremely happy to see the precautionary approach implemented in Bill C-55.

Generally, I think this is a big step forward. In conclusion, it takes overdue steps towards greater efficiency, transparency, and clarity in the MPA process. I want to point out this is something that everybody who's involved in this process was asking for, including resource users who, of course, need planning security to know what an MPA actually is and is not. To this end, I think that comprehensive minimum standards are needed so that there's no question what an MPA actually stands for, at a minimum, whereas that's currently not well defined in the Oceans Act.

I really want to talk about the ecosystem approach, which generally should underpin ocean management and which is not explicitly mentioned in Bill C-55, or in marine protected area management. Just to give you a quick example, here at the Ocean Frontier Institute at Dalhousie, we're working on a project to future-proof marine protected areas by accounting for climate change and how climate change may affect our protected area networks and the assets that we're trying to ensure. When those assets move or change in response to climate change, some of which is foreseeable, some of which is uncertain, we need to have both the legal and the scientific...and the planning tools to account for now. This is something we currently don't have, and to have such an ecosystem approach, I think, is sorely needed and it should be mentioned in the Oceans Act.

Then, finally, I think what we're also lacking is the commendable effort to protect 10% of Canada's waters as marine protected areas. It needs to be better integrated with other tools for ocean planning, fisheries management tools, and other ocean planning tools that are specified in the Oceans Act, the Fisheries Act, and other relevant acts. That comprehensive or integrated marine spatial planning is currently not happening nearly to the extent it could. We still have a siloed approach to marine conservation and marine planning, and I think as we're considering the ocean as a whole and we're trying to protect assets against a variety of threats or potential compromises or problems, this integrated marine spatial planning approach is needed and should be specified in the Oceans Act.

With that, I thank the committee again for including me in today's panel and I'm looking forward to your questions and discussion.

[The Chair, Liberal, Scott Simms]

Thank you, Dr. Worm.

Thank you to all.

Again, colleagues, before we start the questioning, all of our guests, as you can plainly see, are in by video conference. It would avoid a lot of confusion when you ask your questions, if you could please point out to whom you're asking your questions so that they know.

That being said, Mr. McDonald, you have seven minutes, please.

[Ken McDonald, Liberal, Avalon, NL]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Thank you to our three witnesses for appearing by video conference this morning.

I have a question, and all of you can probably answer this because each one of you hinted at it or mentioned it to some degree. You can probably answer in the order that you each presented this morning to make it easier to know who's going first, second, and third.

You talked about the marine protected areas, increased enforcement, substantial fines for people who break the rules or go against this. How do we properly do this on a marine protected area when some may be close to shore, some could be a great distance out, and it's not like a terrestrial protected area where you can put a fence around it? You have an imaginary line on the water saying that you can't do this inside this particular line. How do we properly do this?

If increased enforcement is part of the answer to maintain that protected area, how do we do that properly going forward with marine protected areas specifically?

[Dr. Natalie Ban]

I have a couple of ideas on that, which I'm sure my colleagues can add to.

The first is that you're striving for compliance rather than enforcement, ideally. You want people who are using the ocean to know where those MPAs are. That's relatively easy for commercial fisheries because they're already used to having spatial fisheries closures. In their systems, they can see where those lines are. It's much harder for recreational fishers and other small fishers, who might not have those particular boundaries, and other potential users. There are increasing technologies available to assist with that. In the study I mentioned, on rockfish conservation areas, what we heard repeatedly from sports fishers is that they'd like to see an app that tells them when they're inside one of these closures and when they're not. That technology easily exists to be able to do that.

Second, for enforcement, in addition to having adequate capacity, technologies are available to know when boats—via satellites, automatic identification systems, various other technologies, like vessel monitoring systems—are inside and outside those areas. You can also tell, by their movement patterns, when they're likely to be fishing or doing other activities that they're not supposed to. Our increasing technologies are really facilitating the enforcement of marine protected areas.

[Dr. Boris Worm]

I can second that.

We've actually done work on nothing but global patterns of fishing and other human uses. You can do this in Canada and you can do this in the rest of the world via the automatic identification system. Enforcement today actually happens from a desk. It doesn't happen with boats and helicopters as much anymore because we can visualize pretty much everything that's going on. Just in the last two to three years, that technology has matured. It's now globally available. It's used in developing countries even. It's something that is routinely used here. The world is different now that we can see all of these activities. It's different from even three or four years ago.

[Ken McDonald, Liberal, Avalon, NL]

Do you have anything to add, Dr. Devillers?

[Prof. Rodolphe Devillers]

My colleagues covered most of it, but [Technical difficulty—Editor].

I worked on this a few years ago, on a project in collaboration with DFO, and the technology is progressing very rapidly. Maybe what I can add that my colleague did not discuss is that many boats are not equipped with those technologies at the moment. AIS is mostly for large boats. VMS, which is used in fisheries, is a certain portion of the fleet. Moving forward, maybe DFO will have to revisit some of those regulations and try to see if there is a need to cover larger swaths of boats or a better representation of their fleets.

[Ken McDonald, Liberal, Avalon, NL]

Thank you.

Dr. Devillers, you mentioned the cod moratorium in 1992 being the biggest layoff in Canadian history, which was 20,000 people. Being from Newfoundland, I've witnessed it and I still see the effects of it in many of the communities that were tied heavily to the cod fishery. Next spring, it will have been 26 years since the cod moratorium was announced. Why hasn't that stock rebounded or what have we done wrong to prevent it from rebounding?

Obviously, we did something wrong to get it to the state it was in when we declared the moratorium, but why haven't we done something right to get that stock back to a viable commercial fishery over the last 26 years?

[Prof. Rodolphe Devillers]

That's a very complex question. I'm not a cod scientist. Dr. Worm may have a better answer for that.

What I can say is that fishing was a major cause in the collapse, but maybe not the only cause. The recovery was limited by environmental conditions. There have been a number of years where the ocean was not in the same favourable condition for cod, which would prevent that. From what I understand of the problem, there are a number of causes, including environment, bycatch in some fisheries, and some prey that cod were reliant on that were also not recovering in the ecosystem.

The important lesson it taught us is that when we stop putting pressure on the system, it doesn't come back right away. I think that's the important lesson we have to see. When we stress an ecosystem, we cannot expect it to come back to it's natural state in five or 10 years. Sometimes we just screw it up and sometimes it may take decades to come back. That's why we want to be very careful with what we're doing currently across the country, since we know that the ecosystem is very fragile.

[Dr. Boris Worm]

If I could just add to that briefly, I think it's a good case study. Because the fishery was on 100% of the fishing grounds the stock collapsed to a low level that did not allow for recovery immediately. We actually had a talk by Jeff Hutchings on this very topic last night here. He won the Huntsman award this year. He pointed out there's a strong correlation between how far the species is depleted and how quickly it recovers, and that there is a threshold at about 10% of the biomass. If it goes below that threshold it may not recover or it may take a very long time to recover. If we stop to impact it before 10%, it may quickly recover and there's general evidence for that.

I want to point out that if we had insured this incredibly valuable asset through a network of marine protected areas at the time, that collapse wouldn't have been as complete and recovery would most likely have been much quicker because part of the stock would have been protected in a protected area.

[The Chair, Liberal, Scott Simms]

Thank you, Dr. Worm.

Now we go to Mr. Sopuck, for seven minutes, please.

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

Thanks.

Dr. Ban, you made the statement that oil and gas development offshore is not compatible with biodiversity conservation. Can you give me a specific example to back up that statement?

[Dr. Natalie Ban]

Sure, and I will send along one of the scientific papers used for that.

For example—let me just look it up—there was a paper by Ellis and colleagues in 2012 that was examining the discharge drilling waste from oil and gas and some of the problems that it has for benthic communities. It showed there is an effect that's seen up to six kilometres from the actual drilling site, just from the regular discharge drilling waste as part of the oil and gas process. There's a big concern that a lot of these oil and gas activities are going to have impacts beyond just where the actual drilling rig is, affecting the marine communities around them, especially the benthic, the communities on the bottom of the seabed.

I will send that paper along so that you can take a look.

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

Of course, we all know these drilling rigs can also be refugia for certain species who use them as habitat.

Dr. Ban, just to continue on this line, would you recommend the complete elimination of oil and gas development off the coast of eastern Canada?

[Dr. Natalie Ban]

In the long run, especially with the problems of climate change, I think we need to move towards a fossil fuel-free system, so in the long run I would say, yes. In the short run, I think we need to be more practical to see how we can change towards an economy that does not rely on fossil fuels. There will be, of course, some continued use of oil and gas going on, but I do think—

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

Excuse me. Yes, most people don't have the luxury of being employed in the public sector like some of us. I'll give some statistics from eastern Canada. There are almost 10,000 full-time jobs in a very job-scarce area in Atlantic Canada directly related to oil and gas development, and in Newfoundland and Labrador and Nova Scotia $2 billion in royalties are paid each year by the oil and gas industry. Presumably some of that money goes to support universities.

I'm very glad that you were quite honest and up front, and I applaud you for that, about your desire to see the long-term elimination of oil and gas development off eastern Canada. I think that's a courageous statement to make. I vehemently disagree with it, but I commend you for your honesty.

You made the point that fishing is a damaging activity. As an avid angler myself, and there are some four million anglers in Canada, many of whom fish in salt water and the ethos of catch and release has taken hold, what earthly damage could a catch-and-release recreational fishery do inside a marine protected area?

[Dr. Natalie Ban]

That would really depend on the species. Let me go back to the example for rockfish that I mentioned. Rockfish, for example, are fish that have a closed swim bladder. When they get pulled from the depth, where they live, say, 40, 60, even 30 metres, their swim bladder expands and they cannot go down again. For the example of rockfish, there's actually about a 90% to 95% mortality even if their release is attempted. There are studies on various species that show what the mortality rate is, and in some cases that's not such a problem and for other species it is.

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

Of course, for a recreational fishery, gear can be regulated. For example, the kind of gear used to catch rockfish could be banned, and there could be surface trolling for salmon, for example, off the B.C. coast.

I happen to be a fisheries biologist myself. The hooking mortality for Atlantic salmon, in particular, is almost zero, and for other salmonid species, it's in the 5% range, so I think these kinds of blanket statements need to be supported by fact. We had an earlier witness last year on this who was aware of the situation in California, where there is a great number of MPAs, and they are all in very prime fishing areas, and remote and rural communities that depended on tourism were severely affected by this kind of policy.

Dr. Ban, you also talked about co-management with aboriginal communities, and that's fine, yet you completely ignored the other coastal communities and whether they should be part of a co-management program. Don't you think they deserve the same kind of consideration?

[Dr. Natalie Ban]

I believe that all of the ocean stakeholders should be involved in management of marine protected areas. My point about indigenous peoples was that they do have constitutional rights in Canada that are protected, which make them particularly important to engage at the level of a government, not simply as stakeholders.

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

Of course, as a person who represents a number of first nation communities in my own constituency, I represent all citizens, and I think all citizens deserve consideration.

Dr. Devillers, one of the witnesses—I think it was last year—from Simon Fraser University talked about the proponents of migratory pelagic species and how a marine protected area could protect a pelagic, highly migratory species by having a designated area, for example, in the middle of the ocean where certain species would be there for only a short period of time and then gone.