Fisheries Committee on Aug. 11th, 2020

[Alexandra Morton]

Thank you.

The Canadian public spent $23 million on the Cohen commission, and I think Justice Bruce Cohen did a fine job of looking at what we know about wild salmon and what needs to be done. He said that if we want the Fraser River sockeye—the commission was just on the Fraser River sockeye—then salmon farms have to be removed from the Discovery Islands by September of this year if there's greater than minimal impact.

DFO has not come to me to ask about the sea lice outbreak this year. They were not out there themselves. Justice Bruce Cohen also said that the chance that the government has been captured by the fish farm industry is substantial, and when you see regulatory people moving back and forth—working in industry, then working in DFO, then moving back to industry—they are the same people. DFO has become part of the salmon farming industry.

The salmon stocks have gone lower than they were in 2009, which triggered the Cohen commission, so if you were to grade the government response to this commission based on salmon returns, you'd have to give them a failing grade, because in the end the only thing that matters is whether or not the fish are coming, and they're simply not. We are headed for the lowest season yet again.

I'm not sure people realize it. For so long they have heard that salmon stocks are going down, but extinction is right there at the bottom, and we're very close. My colleagues who are working in the upper Fraser River are seeing that for themselves.

The grade is failing. They have not followed those recommendations and restored the wild salmon runs of this province.

[The Chair, Liberal, Ken McDonald]

Thank you, Mr. Johns. Your time is up. I'm hopefully going to get you another round.

We'll now go to Mr. Arnold for five minutes or less, please. I will be strict on the time to make sure we get through the full round.

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

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

I'll switch to Mr. Snyder, if possible.

Mr. Snyder, you mentioned in your opening remarks that the dated coded wire tag program continues to be used by DFO, and I assume it's being used for DFO's assessment and return monitoring systems.

Are you aware of the newer technologies and methods that could replace the coded wire tag system?

[Dustin Snyder]

I am. To quickly reiterate, the coded wire tag information I was referring to is the stuff they were looking at with regard to the Penny hatchery that was up here, which was DFO's facility that was running the coded wire tag program. That facility never actually met its quota for how many were released to be an official indicator stock. Some years, actually, the place ran out of water and they had to transfer those fish elsewhere and had mass die-offs, and yet the information from that hatchery that was shut down over a decade ago is still being used today to make decisions.

Yes, I am aware of some of the parentage-based tagging, and I think that's a good way to go.

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

Do you know why DFO refuses to retire the coded wire tag system and transition towards other, newer, better technologies?

[Dustin Snyder]

In a state of the salmon presentation that I recently saw from somebody in DFO, there were multiple pictures of a rear-view mirror. DFO is telling itself that it needs to stop doing this and looking in that rear-view mirror. Unfortunately, I think that's all it is; this is what's always been done, so this is what's continuing to be done.

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

Thank you.

In the last few months here, I've had the opportunity to tour a salmon hatchery in the Okanagan system. That hatchery has enabled the restoration of sockeye salmon stocks into the Okanagan water system, which feeds into the Columbia, restoring those stocks for the first time in decades or over 100 years. Now they're actually able to migrate all the way up into Okanagan Lake. That hatchery was built on a small stream in Penticton. When I was there, they showed me what they called a hatchery in a box. It was a self-contained hatchery in a 20-foot Sea-Can shipping container.

You mentioned that large-scale hatcheries aren't the way to go. Do you see an opportunity or a use for smaller, sometimes portable, hatcheries that could be placed on some of these streams that, as you mentioned, see only a dozen returns in a year to rebuild those stocks? Would those be a way to go? I understand Washington state in the U.S. has been using them, but DFO has really shown no interest or has been reluctant here in Canada.

[Dustin Snyder]

I am familiar with them, and the ONA is doing some great work there. I would suggest that there do need to be some alterations to those, especially given that they would be operating on severely endangered stocks. For example, for our hatchery, we have backup power; we have redundancy in all of our filtering and all of our pumps.

As well, we have a bit of a different climate up here. Last year, we saw -47°C for almost a week straight. You have to pump a lot of water through those tin cans in order not to get a freeze-up at -47°C.

I would suggest that, yes, there is potential, but there would need to be some modifications or some placement situations in which maybe those things would be placed in Prince George, for example, and the brood stock would still be transferred in and out, as opposed to being plunked into a really remote area that, if there was a power failure, might be extremely difficult to get to when there is 10 feet of snow in February or something like that.

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

Would these tie in well with the new identification systems, the DNA testing, so they could match parent fish to the stream they actually came from and make sure those eggs and fry that were being hatched out would go into that genetically specific stream type?

[Dustin Snyder]

Yes. We do need to reinvigorate that program up here to ensure that our genetic information is accurate, but yes, there is potential to use those programs with a “hatchery in a can” concept.

[The Chair, Liberal, Ken McDonald]

Thank you, Mr. Arnold.

We'll now go to Mr. Hardie for five minutes or less.

Go ahead, please.

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

Thank you again, Mr. Chair.

Mr. Donnelly, would you say there is dysfunctional competition between the various fishing interests—the commercial, the indigenous and the sport fishing? If so, do you think that is also harming the stocks?

[Fin Donnelly]

Absolutely, there's vested interest in protecting the access to a way of life, for sure. There are also going to be varied interests in terms of what is considered the solution. I think what we have to look at—and that's why, again, we've continued to focus on watershed CPR—is that just looking at the symptoms is not going to provide the best solutions. We need to look at the root cause.

We are talking about hatcheries being part of the solution. As Mr. Snyder said, I think that conservation-based, science-related hatcheries can play a role in the solution, but we know that, if we look south of the border at California, Washington and Oregon, this has not proven to be a solution since the 1970s. If we look back over the last 30 or 40 years, they have not seen the results of implementing that managed solution.

We need to do something different in Canada. We have a real opportunity, not just with the Fraser and north Columbia but also with the Skeena, the Nass and the other great watersheds that you mentioned, Mr. Hardie. We need to prevent the damage that's happening from many industrial developments. We need to work smarter and do things better. We need to protect habitat. We need to restore habitat where damaged, and then we need a conservation ethic.

The ecosystem is going to be your best and cheapest solution to solving the problem. If we can assist in any way, it will be to focus on restoring the ecosystem, protecting the ecosystem and letting that do its job.

The issue—

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

Fin, you alluded to something a little earlier, which I want to touch on before my time runs out, and that is the pressure from foreign fishing out in the deep ocean. We saw the cod fishery impacted, particularly by Portuguese and Spanish fishing. What about the Pacific? What do we know about what's going on out there that officialdom doesn't seem to be able to deal with?

[Fin Donnelly]

That's a great question, Mr. Hardie. I thank you for asking that.

When I was a member of Parliament and the fisheries and oceans critic for the NDP in 2017, I asked the then minister of fisheries and his chief of staff, Ms. Blewett, that question, and the response was that we knew the flag of the country that had these massive nets out, not far from domestic waters, in international waters off our shores, but we weren't able to come forward with identifying that country because of the lack of support at the G7 or G8 table. That again is part of the bold solution. We need to out those countries that are taking our fish in massive quantities. If there is illegal, unreported and unregulated fishing happening in our waters, we as a country need to identify that.

We also know that even in domestic waters we can be doing a better job of harvesting with selective methods, in the Fraser and in many other watersheds as well. There are many solutions we can look at with regard to the harvest issue, not to mention habitat and hatcheries.

If I could leave the committee with one imperative, it would be to please act now. Bold action is needed. There's a framework that's already been mentioned and outlined in much of the witness testimony you've already heard.

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

I have a quick question for you, Mr. Pearce. Every time we talk about managing the seal population, interests in the United States go crazy on us. They start saying, well, we're not going to import your lobster anymore, etc. Do you think we'll need to let the U.S. go first with some form of action before we're able to?

[The Chair, Liberal, Ken McDonald]

You have 15 seconds.

[Ken Pearce]

From what I can see, they're fully aware of the pinniped problem on the Columbia and in Puget Sound. They've done their test studies and are moving forward. As I said before, we're just waiting for the outcome of this 23-member panel to discuss it. They're not concerned about the public; they're concerned about their fish now.

[The Chair, Liberal, Ken McDonald]

Thank you, Mr. Hardie.

We'll now go to Mr. Bragdon for five minutes or less.

Go ahead, please.

[Richard Bragdon, Conservative, Tobique—Mactaquac, NB]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

I just want to go back to Mr. Donnelly one more time, and I want to circle back to whether the Fraser watershed initiative is an initiative of the Rivershed Society of British Columbia. Is it working in conjunction with them?

[Fin Donnelly]

Thanks, Mr. Bragdon.

The Fraser watershed initiative is the creation of the Rivershed Society of British Columbia, and we are focused on encouraging the federal, provincial and first nation governments to make a significant investment. Currently, the project is on hold until we're able to secure further investment.

The Rivershed Society is also a member of the BC Watershed Security Coalition, and we've been working closely with a provincial focus, so it's broader than just the Fraser, to look at encouraging the federal and provincial governments to invest in watershed security.

I mentioned earlier in testimony that the COVID-19 devastation is one opportunity for the governments to look at partnering to get people working. Many of these jobs in restoration allow for social distancing, and you could invest quickly and get people back to work.

[Richard Bragdon, Conservative, Tobique—Mactaquac, NB]

Thank you, Mr. Donnelly.

I see that my colleague Mr. Fast is on the call, so I'm going to yield the rest of my time to Mr. Fast.

[Ed Fast, Conservative, Abbotsford, BC]

Thank you very much, Chair.

Thanks, Mr. Bragdon, for ceding your time.

Ms. Morton, I appreciate your passionate intervention. Your focus has been the fish farms. When I look through the Cohen commission's recommendations, I see a host of recommendations that the government suggests have effectively been responded to, but in fact that is not the case.

If you had to pick two critical actions that the federal government could take beyond eliminating fish farms on the most critical fish migration routes, what would those two actions be?

[Alexandra Morton]

Appoint a regional director of Pacific wild salmon, because there is nobody in DFO whose entire focus is what is going on with these fish.

Also, you will be talking to Dr. Kristi Miller-Saunders, so pick up that science and use it, because that is phenomenal. That is the most powerful salmon restoration tool we have ever had. It goes straight to the fish. We can work with them. We can make changes and we can ask the fish, “Did we make it better or not?”

Those would be my two recommendations.

[Ed Fast, Conservative, Abbotsford, BC]

Okay.

You heard some testimony today about pinnipeds. You also heard testimony about hatcheries. Are these issues that you feel are critical and need to be addressed, or do you feel that they are secondary to the primary interest of yours, which is the fish farms?