Fisheries Committee on July 23rd, 2020

[The Chair, Liberal, Ken McDonald]

Yes, that would be greatly appreciated. Thank you.

Thank you, Ms. Gill, for highlighting that. We do mention at the very beginning each time to ask people to speak slowly so the interpreters can keep up. I know it is hard for people to adjust their normal speech patterns. We try to be as patient as we can and we do encourage witnesses to provide speaking notes so that they can be followed, along with the interpretation. We'll make sure that in the future we'll tell them we have to have their speaking notes up front before they come to committee. Hopefully that will resolve any further problems down the road.

We now go to our questioning. Before I go to Mr. Arnold for six minutes or less, I will say that if you're asking a question, please try to identify the person it's addressed to. It makes it much easier. It will make better use of your six minutes instead of everyone kind of looking in a daze wondering who should answer it. If you could do that, it would make everything go a lot better and you'd get a lot more information. Thank you.

Mr. Arnold, you have six minutes or less.

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

Thank you, Mr. Chair, and thank you to all the witnesses here today. We've certainly heard some varied and interesting testimony.

I want to start off with Professor Walters. What species of pinnipeds are preventing the recovery of Pacific salmon in B.C. waters, in your estimation?

[Carl Walters]

In the southern interior part of B.C., in the Georgia Strait area, it is harbour seals. On the outside waters, particularly impacting herring and some of our chinook stocks, it's the Steller sea lion. In recent years, there's been a fairly dramatic, but not closely monitored, increase in the number of California sea lions that are moving into our waters over the winter period.

We think the two species—the harbour seal and the Steller sea lion—are the main problem.

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

Thank you.

DFO recently provided the committee with written responses to questions raised in another meeting. DFO's response stated, and I quote:

The current harbour seal population is in line with historic population norms, after depletion by overhunting prior to receiving statutory protection in 1970.

Steller sea lion populations in BC waters have increased by approximately 4-fold since surveys began in the early 1970s.

Do you agree with this statement and the numbers?

[Carl Walters]

Absolutely not. The major paper that came out in 2010, and we repeated this work, used historical commercial harvest and culling information on harbour seals. There's a lot of back-calculation of how many seals were around in the 1880s, around the time when the first nations fish harvesting collapsed completely because of smallpox. At that time, we calculated that there were about half as many seals in B.C. as there are today.

Also, as I mentioned, first nations people have been harvesting seals and sea lions intensively for thousands of years, so when people say this is a natural situation, it isn't natural with respect to anything over the last several millennia.

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

Thank you.

You mentioned that first nations had been harvesting seals or marine mammals for millennia. Is there currently a market for the seals or sea lions? We're not talking about a cull here. We're actually talking about a manageable harvest that would contribute to the economic activity of first nations and British Columbia and Canada.

[Carl Walters]

There's a hope that commercial markets can be developed. One of the key parts of the proposals out there now is to test market options. Right now, the only obvious marketing options are for things like crab bait and for food for mink farms.

They've had a similar problem in terms of getting commercial fishermen to be willing to harvest seals back east, in that there's a lack of markets for the meat or other products.

There's a long-term hope that they can develop overseas markets, particularly in China. The Chinese apparently like to eat—

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

Okay, so there is potential for markets, so we're not talking about a cull. We're actually talking about a potential managed harvest. Thank you.

I want to switch to Mr. Zeman, if I can, from the BC Wildlife Federation.

Mr. Zeman, you were mentioning a report that was altered. Could you elaborate a little further on that? Why would DFO change or alter a report or censor scientific data or input that was in there?

[Jesse Zeman]

There are two processes. There's the recovery potential assessment, the RPA, which is a peer-reviewed science document that basically points to the causes and potential solutions. Then that's followed up with a science advisory report, which is really a layperson's interpretation. What happened is the RPA was conducted and went through the peer review process and, as far as we can tell through freedom of information requests to the province, somehow the wording or findings in the RPA were edited in the science advisory report. What the FOI tends to indicate is that this was done to downplay the role of nets on interior Fraser steelhead.

This broader issue around not being able to get data or information out of DFO and not being accountable to the public is a long-standing issue here in B.C. The ATIP of the federal government in that process resulted in a response that it would take 822 years to get the correspondence.

There is some hiding going on with that issue.

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

Thank you.

I would like to go back to Mr. Walters again.

Again, in a DFO response, they quoted:

There remains a large degree of uncertainty and lack of scientific consensus regarding the impact of pinnipeds versus other predators on salmon, as well as other factors which may also be contributing to stock declines.

DFO also wrote that:

The Department has embarked on a pinniped diet study to address this uncertainty.

Are you aware of any other relevant pinniped diet studies that have already answered the questions of uncertainty?

[Carl Walters]

No, and we're not going to be able to get a whole lot more accurate information.

The basic problem with juvenile salmon in Georgia Strait being eaten by seals is that it's a tiny percentage of the seals' diet. They eat so many tonnes of fish in general that only a tiny fraction of those tonnes need be juvenile salmon in order for it to be a very large number of juvenile salmon. Therefore, additional diet studies are not going to resolve the uncertainty.

Also, even if we could prove the diet data that we gathered at UBC that does show enough being eaten to account for the mortality change, even if we can confirm those numbers, it won't address this issue that we don't know whether the juvenile fish being eaten by the seals are ones that were sick because of things like disease or warm water and would have died even if the seals were reduced. That uncertainty can only—

[The Chair, Liberal, Ken McDonald]

Thank you, Mr. Walters. Thank you, Mr. Arnold.

We'll now go to Mr. Hardie for six minutes or less, please.

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

I only have six minutes. Let's get started, then.

Mr. Walters, we've been looking at the east coast fishery as well, particularly all the efforts to recover the cod off Newfoundland. Since 1992, they've been working at it, and we have had very little success. My friends from the Rock will note with great interest that the pinniped situation on the east coast also appears to be unresolved.

Do you get the connection there?

[Carl Walters]

Yes. I actually recently published a paper with George Rose on the northern cod stock. We examined the survey data and we've shown that the northern cod stock actually is rebuilding at a fairly high geometric rate, but it's still at such low numbers that it's going to be a long time before it reaches high biomass again.

DFO research in the Gulf of St. Lawrence indicates that seal predation impacts on the western-southern Gulf of St. Lawrence cod stock are probably very high, and have caused the natural mortality rate to be about four times higher than it should be.

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

I'll have to interrupt there, because I have a few other questions.

Mr. Zeman, a Senate study back in the mid-2000s asked the DFO to study the impact of drift gillnets and set gillnets in the Fraser River. To your knowledge, are those implements still being used?

[Jesse Zeman]

Yes, they are, both legally and illegally. The challenge with a net is that if a fish is the right size, it's going to get caught in that net, and there's a very high likelihood that even if it falls out of the net or somebody puts it back in the river, it's going to end up dead, so—

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

Are there sensitivities about relationships with indigenous people, first nations, etc.? Are they the ones who are more likely to be using these nets?

[Jesse Zeman]

It's really interesting that you bring that up, because in the first year of the salmon restoration and innovation fund, there were actually applications from first nations to transition to more selective methods, and those applications were turned down.

There is definitely an interest from a number of first nations on the Fraser to move to more selective methods, recognizing that, first of all, it's impacting fish that live there, but it's also impacting the really low stocks.

The reality is that if we continue down this road with gillnets and we have more weak stocks, we're not going to be able to fish, so we have to transition to selective methods. There are first nations that want to pursue that direction. They were turned down. We did a lot of work with the provincial government. I know that selective fishing methods are now a priority in shrimp, but this again just indicates the lack of direction coming out of a high level that.... We don't have the fish we used to have. We need to address our fishing practices and, quite frankly, we're 100 years behind on that.

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

Mr. Hill, I have a quick question for you.

Last year we heard an awful lot from people out on the water that the Southern Strait of Georgia was absolutely teeming with hatchery fish from Washington state. It raises the concern that maybe the information that we have on the state of the stocks, or what might be available for fishing, is still highly incomplete or just plain wrong.

What are your thoughts on that?

[Aaron Hill]

You raise a very good point, Mr. Hardie. There was good fishing, and there is again this year, for certain Washington state and B.C. stocks transiting through the Salish Sea. It sort of masks the larger declines that we've seen coast-wide, and the poor state of the Fraser chinook populations that are migrating alongside those stocks. The abundance of a few populations is driving the harvest, while a great number of smaller and endangered populations are being hit even harder in the process of fishing.

It speaks to the need—as I mentioned, and Mr. Zeman and Mr. Hwang mentioned—for greater monitoring of the use of genetic stock identification to understand the stock composition of the catch as it's migrating through. There are ways to shift fishery management to take greater advantage of abundant stocks and have lower impact on the comigrating endangered populations. There have been several proposals put forward to the department to shift in that direction, and that's what we need to do.

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

How much time do I have left, Mr. Chair?

[The Chair, Liberal, Ken McDonald]

You have one minute.

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

If we look at the health of the fish—not just the number of fish—and the health of the things that the fish eat, where are we on that? Especially with the herring, the plankton and the things that fish like to eat, are they in as tough shape as the fish themselves?

Mr. Hwang, do you have any thoughts on that?

[Jason Hwang]

I think that's a giant question, Mr. Hardie.

In summary, the ocean is changing from what we have been used to. Mr. Walters spoke to that to some degree and would probably be able to give more in-depth comment. Some of the herring populations are in decline and some are doing well, but it's a massive and complex issue in terms of ecological interaction.

[The Chair, Liberal, Ken McDonald]

Thanks, Mr. Hardie. Your time is up.