Fisheries Committee on Feb. 1st, 2018

[The Chair, Liberal, Scott Simms]

Good morning, everyone.

I apologize for being late this morning. I rely on Ottawa transit; they were just slightly behind this morning—much like me.

We're continuing with our study for marine protected areas.

I want to thank the committee for indulging me on this one. I say this on behalf of Mr. McDonald. I hope we can do this. The one area of the country we haven't been to yet on the MPA study is Newfoundland and Labrador. Today we're not discussing that specifically, but we're going to use an example.

I want to welcome all the way from the town of Happy Adventure, Mr. George Feltham, who is from the Eastport region.

George, it's good to see you this morning.

From the Department of Fisheries and Oceans, we have Mr. Robert Lambert, who is director, oceans management, Newfoundland and Labrador region. We also have Christie Chute, who is the manager of marine conservation programs.

Mr. Lambert, you have up to 10 minutes.

[Robert Lambert, Director, Oceans Management, Newfoundland and Labrador Region, Department of Fisheries and Oceans]

Thank you, Mr. Chair and members of the committee, for the opportunity to be here today.

The Government of Canada remains committed to increasing the protection of Canada's marine and coastal areas from the current 7.75% to 10% by 2020. My role includes managing regional initiatives under this marine conservation agenda. To achieve this target, we will continue establishing marine protected areas and marine refuges to safeguard the health of our oceans for future generations.

I'm here today to talk about the Eastport marine protected area, which was one of the first Oceans Act MPAs established in the country.

During the early 1990s, harvesters in the Eastport area recognized serious declines in lobster. This decline was attributed to redirected fishing efforts following the groundfish closures known as the cod moratorium. In 1995, the Fisheries Resource Conservation Council recommended that harvesters take measures to increase egg production, reduce exploitation rates, and improve stock structure, and that local stakeholder groups and management officials collaborate to sustain their resources. In response, the Eastport Peninsula Lobster Protection Committee was formed in 1995 to implement a conservation strategy for lobster on the Eastport Peninsula.

Based on some initial successes in this initiative, such as increased community involvement and v-notching to protect egg-bearing female lobsters, the committee developed a joint project agreement with Fisheries and Oceans Canada in 1997 to close two areas of prime lobster habitat. Those were Round Island and Duck Islands. That was done under the Fisheries Act. This agreement also established the 400-square-kilometre Eastport Peninsula lobster management area, limiting access to lobster fisheries to the seven local communities.

In 1999 the committee approached Fisheries and Oceans Canada to establish these two closed areas as an Oceans Act MPA as a way to provide long-term protection. At that time, marine protection as a concept was still developing, and the department pursued this area in order to lay the foundation for future conservation efforts.

Following years of data-gathering and consultations, Eastport was designated as an MPA in 2005. The main conservation objective for the Eastport MPA is to maintain a viable population of American lobster through the conservation, protection, and sustainable use of resources and habitats within the area.

A science monitoring program has taken place inside and outside the MPA since 1997 to determine the size of the lobster population. This includes collection of data from commercial logbooks and at-sea sampling to determine catch per unit effort and size structure of the population. Catch per unit effort is an indirect measure of the abundance of a target species. A tagging program compares the average size of lobster inside versus outside the MPA. In addition, specialized traps have been introduced to monitor very small and very large lobsters. Future research will examine lobster movements and spillover MPA effects and will estimate egg production inside the MPA.

DFO has heard concerns with respect to the size of the MPA and its contribution to the conservation of biodiversity. The science monitoring program has shown higher abundance of large egg-bearing females and increases in mean size of both male and female lobsters within the population. It also continues to show a stable catch per unit effort both inside the MPA and in the surrounding Eastport Peninsula lobster management area.

The Eastport MPA continues to meet its goal of maintaining a viable population of American lobster and includes the participation of stakeholders in the management of the resource. To support effective management within the MPA, a management plan was released in 2007 and updated in 2013 in consultation with the Eastport MPA Advisory Committee, which is co-chaired by a member of the EPLPC and DFO. A third management plan will be released in 2018, covering the next five years.

Following the initial management plan release, annual service-level agreements were developed with the conservation and protection branch of DFO in order to increase patrols during vulnerable times of the year. As of 2007, additional patrols of the MPA were conducted. Compliance with the management measures in the Eastport MPA has been high due in part to the enhanced patrols and increased stewardship from the local communities and fishers.

Regular consultations have occurred with a variety of local stakeholders and other groups on the Eastport MPA. An annual general meeting of the Eastport MPA Advisory Committee and regular science-focused and public meetings serve a critical role in adaptive management of the MPA.

This community-driven MPA has brought fish harvesters, government, community youth, academics, and science together. As a result, there has been sharing of information and knowledge for better management of the area and its lobster fishery. Since the establishment of the Eastport MPA, we continue to become more knowledgeable on the marine environment and how marine protected areas and refuges can help play an important role in the department's ongoing conservation effort.

While scientists have documented the benefits of individual MPAs such as Eastport, the site selection process for MPAs is evolving. In recent years, potential MPA sites have been more informed by science—such as the consideration of ecologically and biologically significant areas—and future MPAs will be identified in the context of marine protected area networks.

Thank you for the opportunity to speak today, and I look forward to your questions.

[The Chair, Liberal, Scott Simms]

Thank you, Mr. Lambert. We appreciate that very much.

Did you say Eastport was the first one?

[Robert Lambert]

It was one of the first ones, yes.

[The Chair, Liberal, Scott Simms]

It was one of the first ones, okay. I knew it was one of them. I just wasn't sure if it was the first or not the first. I guess we don't really know, do we?

[Christie Chute, Manager, Marine Conservation Programs, Department of Fisheries and Oceans]

It's not the first—Endeavour, on the west coast, is the first—but it is one of the first.

[The Chair, Liberal, Scott Simms]

For the east coast, certainly.

Thank you for that, Mr. Lambert.

We're going to Mr. Feltham, retired fisherman. You still live in Happy Adventure, do you?

[George Feltham, Fisherman, Eastport Region, As an Individual]

Eastport.

[The Chair, Liberal, Scott Simms]

Oh, it's greater Eastport now. I see. Now I'm corrected.

Mr. Feltham, go ahead. You have up to 10 minutes, please.

[George Feltham]

Well first of all, good morning, and I would like to thank you for the opportunity to testify before the Standing Committee on Fisheries.

My name is George Feltham, and I have been a fish harvester for 34 years. My family has been in the fishery for over 200 years. One of the things we have survived on over the years has been diversification in the fishery, which has led us to be able to be here today.

Even though lobster is small in our area, it's very important to the annual income of harvesters. With the importance of the lobsters to our annual income, we saw the biggest decline ever, in 1993, in our lobster population. Some of it was overfishing, some of it was environmental, and I guess the problems go on as in any other fisheries.

We saw the need to alleviate some of the pressure on the lobster population, so the fishermen themselves got together, with co-operation from DFO, from enforcement and from oceans, and came up with the closed areas that we have. The areas were picked and put there by fish harvesters, and verified by science after. The reason I stress that is because harvesters have a lot of knowledge of the oceans, of the ocean bottom, of where the fish are too, and where the fish congregate.

One of the things is that I get sort of annoyed when people are talking about MPAs.... And I'm a strong supporter of MPAs, because I believe that MPAs can work, but it has to be done for the right reasons. They've got to be there to serve the people. One of the things we lose sight of quite often is where the terrestrial is or where it's marine. The ocean is a big place, and everyone had the concept that you can go anywhere in this big place and fish. That is so false. You just can't go everywhere. There are prime areas where you can go and fish, and there are areas where you can go and never get a fish. It's not so big as you think.

One of the things we did, to relate back to our MPA, is we mapped the fishing activity that's taking place. We can't be blindsided today, because our activities have changed over the last number of years.... We have to go back where we traditionally fished. We moved from a groundfish to a shellfish, going back to a groundfish again. Our traditional fishing activity has to be taken into account.

If you go around and ask people whether we should develop an MPA, everyone out there would say yes. But when you say you're putting it in their backyard—or my backyard— then they don't want it. There's a price that people have to pay, and when we put our terrestrial parks in place, we never recognized the local people, the local users. As a matter of fact, the local parks, to this day and age, in my back door, are crucifying the people who live within and next to the boundaries, with no recognition. Even though we have 200 years of history there, we're not recognized.

My point here is that on a going-ahead basis, things are going to change. If we put an MPA in place, changes are coming. Fisheries change, everything changes. The number one thing is that the primary user groups have to be consulted and have to have a say in establishment of any MPA. Not only do we have to have a say, but we have to have an input in where it goes, in management.

That's what happened in Eastport. We were lucky. We had good people in DFO, good people in enforcement, in oceans, who were going to sit down and work with the people and the communities. It didn't happen overnight.

Some people will look back and say, “But it's small. It's small.” But to get to where we got to, we have to go through the same process as if they took in half of the Atlantic Ocean. You have to consult more people. We had to consult communities that were 50 to 70 kilometres away from us, because their licences had the right to fish in our area, and what we were proposing was taking away that right.

We had to look at how we could minimize the impact on our industry and our community. You can't just take 50 or 60 harvesters out of a little community like mine and throw them to one side. Our communities would die. We have to make sure that, whatever effect MPAs or parks have on that community, the direct stakeholders are looked after.

The other thing we have to be careful of, and it was a selling point for the Eastport MPA, is that when we started this process, no one thought about recreational users. All of a sudden we had a battle that this couldn't go ahead. If we're going to protect the environment, then we have to get everyone out of there.

What we want is to create a pristine area where science alone can go in and do work on the most natural basis that it can. When we're creating MPAs, we cannot allow one user group in and another user group out. If we do, we're doomed for failure. Right from the beginning we're doomed for failure.

For our MPA enforcement, yes, we get enforcement from DFO, and once in a while they drop by. We're in the location, and one area is close to Parks Canada. Yes, they drop by sometimes, but 90% of the enforcement was done by the fish harvesters themselves because they believed in what they were doing. That's why. They created it; it came from the grassroots. They believed in what they were doing.

I had more statistics on what we did, but I had to change my presentation because I didn't think you wanted to hear the statistics twice.

I think there's a lot to learn. I think people should sit down and look at what we did and the co-operation we had with enforcement. We convinced fishery officers in enforcement to come to our meetings and sit down to put it all on the table beforehand, before they went crawling around the rocks with cameras and everything else, trying to get someone to do this or that. We laid it on the table; they laid it on the table. That was the co-operation we had with the departments.

I guess I'll close there.

[The Chair, Liberal, Scott Simms]

Well done. Thank you, Mr. Feltham. As always, we appreciate it.

By the way, Mr. Feltham mentioned terrestrial rules. I think what he's referring to is that Eastport is adjacent to Terra Nova National Park. They're essentially surrounded by Terra Nova National Park. He has terrestrial rules and he has the MPA as well.

That being said, thank you to our witnesses for their statements.

Now were going to go to questions. However, committee, can you indulge me? Do you mind if I ask a very quick question, only because I know the area very well? I think this is a question for Mr. Lambert and Ms. Chute.

Around the time of the Eastport announcement we made at the Legion in 2005, there was also talk of an MPA around the community of Leading Tickles. That didn't work, and it didn't go ahead. Does anybody have an idea as to why that didn't go ahead?

[Robert Lambert]

I wasn't part of that.

[The Chair, Liberal, Scott Simms]

That's fine. I thought maybe you had that information. I do know there were two on the go at the time. One succeeded and the other one not so much.

[Robert Lambert]

I think it's fair to say that Eastport went ahead because of the strong support of local fishers and the local community. I know that about the Eastport. I'm not sure about the....

[The Chair, Liberal, Scott Simms]

I think that may answer my question.

Mr. McDonald for seven minutes, please.

[Ken McDonald, Liberal, Avalon, NL]

Thank you, Mr. Chair, and thank you to our guests from my home province for appearing here today.

In listening to what you both said, it seems like when this was done you did it right.

We get a lot of witnesses appearing before us, and they say they're not consulted, or DFO has not stayed in touch with them, that they did something before anybody knew about it.

How did you manage to make it work so well in Eastport? It must have been a bit of a struggle at times.

[George Feltham]

Yes, well any change is rough, there's no question about it. People resist, struggle. People assume that you're trying to do something to hurt them.

I guess you had to start with attitude changes. Bob Wiseman was in charge of DFO in St. John's at the time. We had a number of meetings from community to community around Bonavista Bay that were directly affected. Then we did a consulting process in communities. We had to sell it to fishermen. We sold it.

We closed off our area as well to outsiders. We locked ourselves in and locked them out. What we did is that we took the boundaries where they never fish and we made overlap areas where both parties could fish, so it sort of appeased them.

We also—which I never mentioned—went a step further in Eastport and developed an education module on responsible fishing. We got it accepted by some of the teachers. It wasn't a mandatory thing in school, but we did get it accepted by some of the schools, which certainly educated people as well.

[Ken McDonald, Liberal, Avalon, NL]

Do you have any comment to that, Mr. Lambert?

[Robert Lambert]

Well I guess the success in Eastport went largely back to the fact that, from a DFO perspective, DFO was actually approached by the local fishers. Right out of the gate, we had the support of the local fishers, who also brought along the support of the local communities and so on.

There was an awful lot of consultation, as was mentioned earlier. It didn't happen overnight. There was consultation all along the way. When the MPA was established, there was a good governance structure so that there was a continuation of discussions and what was working, what was not working. There's a management plan that can be adapted should changes be required and that type of thing.

The discussion and consultation prior to its implementation, along with the science work that went with that—so there was research as well that was available—all I think, combined, worked out very well. The fact that there was a lot of consultation beforehand, good support from the community, that it was based on good science, was a very good recipe for an MPA.

[Ken McDonald, Liberal, Avalon, NL]

Mr. Feltham, you mentioned that the main reason to do this was for the lobster fishery. Obviously, it's worked. The spillover I guess has given a great industry a good quota there so you can continue to lobster fish.

Were there any other species that you've seen an improvement in by doing that MPA? Was there an increase in cod, or anything else that would be harvested?

[George Feltham]

Cod is very migratory, and it's hard to measure if the MPA has had any impact on cod whatsoever. One thing we do have is a sea urchin fishery that is just outside of our MPA, which inside of our MPA does allow the sea urchins to continue to grow and move outside the area as well.

I firmly believe that however large or small an area is, there's a lot of diversity, and, if you close it, there's a benefit to whatever species is in that area. A lumpfish fishery used to be in that area, lobster, herring—very little crab, other than shell water crab, rock crab, or toad crab—so all these species got a benefit from that.

[Ken McDonald, Liberal, Avalon, NL]

Very good.

I'll close by saying that I think you've done something exceptional, to do that the way you've done it and in co-operation with DFO, to get everybody onside. You had to tell fishermen from other places, “Look, you're not allowed here anymore.” I'm sure some of them were probably upset at the time, and probably downright nasty at times. To get that accomplished is a credit to yourself and DFO for working on that issue to get it done the way it should be done.

I'd like to see more of that when we're creating MPAs.

[George Feltham]

We've gone steps further than that in co-operation with DFO, in working with DFO, and even in our crab fishery, our snow crab fishery. We have closed areas for our snow crab fishery now, half-mile zones between the inner and outer, just to protect and take pressure off people just fishing by the line. What we did is create half-mile zones, which help conserve the crab stock in given areas as well.

There are a number of initiatives that we've done. It's not a closed area. I understand that. It's not a closed area, but it's still the same principles.

[Ken McDonald, Liberal, Avalon, NL]

Again, thank you.

[The Chair, Liberal, Scott Simms]

Mr. Arnold, you have seven minutes, please.