Fisheries Committee on May 10th, 2021

[The Chair, Liberal, Ken McDonald]

Thank you, Mr. Trudel.

We'll now go to Mr. Johns for two and a half minutes.

Go ahead, please.

[Gord Johns, NDP, Courtenay—Alberni, BC]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Mr. Hurwitz, you talked about the department and the impact of those cuts. Maybe you could elaborate about that and about the attrition and about how that impacts the important work you're doing.

[Dave Hurwitz]

We partner with DFO in every which way. We're the data collectors. We're raising and studying fish. We are looking through tagging and research at the bottlenecks that Dr. Beamish alludes to, at least in our area. The cutbacks on that research affect it greatly. We haven't talked about poaching. That's a factor. Bycatch is a factor.

We speak about how the countries can work together. Let's face it: After all the enhancement we do in Clayoquot Sound, we know from tagging that over 50% are caught by the Alaskans, and nobody's brought up yet the impacts of salmon ranching in Alaska. An Alaskan bird biologist noticed die-offs due to lack of food from the competition from all these ranched fish.

Getting back to us, yes, it's tough. The region is suffering. We are not able to produce as many fish. The attention is not on us.

We are not big hatcheries. We're small hatcheries, which is actually the way we should be enhancing fish, not with these giant artificial-type releases. It's ecosystem by ecosystem. That's how we approach it. We approach it with rebuilding. That is a very much more expensive way to do it than building a great big factory that works on one river.

[Gord Johns, NDP, Courtenay—Alberni, BC]

Thanks for the answer. Thanks for the important work you're doing.

Mr. Angel, you talked about a restoration economy. Can you talk about how the B.C. restoration fund is working or not working? How's that playing out for Nuu-chah-nulth people on the water and on the ground?

[Dr. Eric Angel]

Thank you. I'm mindful of time here.

Just speaking for Nuu-chah-nulth, I can say that a limited amount of money from that restoration fund went to Nuu-chah-nulth projects.

We put in a lot of proposals. We did get funding for one that is quite important. We're looking at herring because herring is a forage fish and important to salmon, so that's excellent. That's been recognized.

Really, the fundamental problem with the SRIF funding program is that the decisions were made by DFO and the province without direct participation by first nations. We're rights holders; we should be decision-makers. We should be part of that decision-making process.

[Gord Johns, NDP, Courtenay—Alberni, BC]

That's excellent. Thank you.

[The Chair, Liberal, Ken McDonald]

Thank you, Mr. Johns. You are dead on your two and a half minutes.

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

Go ahead, please.

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

Thank you, Mr. Chair. I'll go back to Mr. Beamish again.

Mr. Beamish, I believe we need to understand every factor impacting our Pacific salmon and to take the appropriate actions where possible. I believe we can get a better understanding of the ocean's productivity if we improve our assessment activities. We need to be better aware of wild salmon returns and better informed to improve the management of hatcheries and the harvest and the habitat. Where is better assessment of salmon returns most needed, and how can we improve that assessment process?

[Dr. Richard Beamish]

I can't answer that. I can only repeat that as part of the assessment that you're referring to, which is essential, you need more information. There are too many missing pieces to really understand essentially what the mechanisms are.

I keep telling you that I retired 10 years ago. I don't know enough about how DFO works to answer your question.

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

Can you identify any of those key pieces relatively quickly?

[Dr. Richard Beamish]

Relatively quickly, I'd just tell you again that I think the fundamental mechanism that regulates all salmon, all species throughout their distribution, is that when they enter the ocean, they survive better if they grow faster and quicker.

Remember that even in the best years, 5% of chinook salmon in the Strait of Georgia in the 1970s provided all the fish that everybody wanted. There were 95% that died, but no one really worried about that. Now 99% die, or 99.9%. You need to understand the natural mechanisms that have increased that mortality.

Again, the collapse of the commercial fishery all around the Pacific last year has to be a common mechanism. To all scientists, it is key that we understand that mechanism if we're going to understand the future of Pacific salmon.

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

Thank you.

I'm hoping you might be able to shed a little bit of light on this next point. You've talked about the international co-operation that's needed, and so on. It sounds as though the science is being exchanged. As legislators we have to ask how we get that co-operation. We need an understanding of who might be winners and losers if that international co-operation took place. We haven't been able to look at illegal, unreported and unregulated fisheries. Have you any experience on that?

[Dr. Richard Beamish]

I only know a little bit about it, and yes, it's important.

The North Pacific Anadromous Fish Commission has the co-operation of the international North Pacific Fisheries Commission. However, there are no winners and losers. If what I am doing is basically providing the information all countries need, they need it for their hatchery programs. They need it to understand the future of the fishing resource. Really, everybody is going to benefit.

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

Thank you.

Mr. Hurwitz, could you elaborate a little bit on what your hatchery might gain from the better assessment processes that I spoke about with Mr. Beamish?

[Dave Hurwitz]

We undertake an assessment and we undertake smolt surveys. We're looking at bottlenecks in the estuary by using tagging. We do the snorkel surveys and the creek walks to count the fish.

It's just that 20 years ago we did way more. The data gaps that Dr. Beamish alluded to are due to funding cutbacks in DFO stock assessments that don't allow us to collect as much information as we used to.

Not only that, we've mapped a human genome, and guess what? We've mapped out the salmon genome. We DNA every dead chinook we find in a river. We've built up a database of DNA that scientists like Dr. Beamish can use in the North Pacific when they're collecting and mapping DNA salmon to see where they go.

The hatcheries don't just crank out fish. We are a different hatchery. We are producing the wildest, highest-quality and most genetically sound fish. We provide tons of information that's used by other scientists.

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

Thank you.

In the few seconds I have left, one of the questions burning through all us here is what, in your opinion, a long-term Pacific salmon strategy should look like or what it should include. If you could send us a written submission, that would be excellent towards our study.

[Dave Hurwitz]

Thank you.

[The Chair, Liberal, Ken McDonald]

Thank you, Mr. Arnold.

We'll now go to Mr. Morrissey for five minutes or less, please.

[Bobby Morrissey, Liberal, Egmont, PE]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

I have three questions.

Mr. Johnson, in the opening comments that you didn't get to complete, you started to say that you had an ask for this committee, I believe.

Could you provide that now?

[Larry Johnson]

Yes. The ask was around funding.

The federal government needs to provide adequate funding. We need capital funding for business development in aquaculture and for business development to assist in establishing partnerships with industry.

First nations need the province to also provide support by processing applications in a timely manner. The current process takes way too long.

If the government wants to honour UNDRIP, just give first nations the decision-making ability to make their own decisions on what type of aquaculture they want to develop in their territories and provide the funding necessary for first nations to make it happen.

First nations can also provide advice and examples of how to breathe life into UNDRIP in a meaningful way for first nations. Let first nations help governments define UNDRIP through economic development.

Thank you.

[Bobby Morrissey, Liberal, Egmont, PE]

Thank you for that, Mr. Johnson.

I have a question for Ms. Schmitt. You were pretty categorical. Are you telling this committee that given where we're at now, the salmon stock on the west coast cannot rebuild naturally? I believe you said that it cannot naturally rebuild. Am I understanding your statement correctly?

[Carol Schmitt]

Yes.

Annually, the department surveys many streams and counts the species that return to spawn every year. Most of the chinook populations have 25 or 30 chinook. Even a lot of the enhanced systems that have been....

I described the Nahmint River. I was just doing a summary of the 40 years of enhancement on the Nahmint River, and we're right now at an average of 260 fish. For the first 10 years of the 40-year enhancement, 160,000 smolts were released a year. For the next 10 years, there were 120,000 smolts released a year. For the next 10 years—up to the 30-year point—100,000 were released. Now we're down to about 50,000 being released, but the numbers have remained the same. If you look at the coast-wide numbers of chinook, you see that all the numbers are extremely low. In the Chemainus River and the Kennedy River, I think the system last year got 1,500 fish to release this year from the huge system. On the whole east coast of the island, as well, many of those chinook stocks are down to very few adult returns. When you only have a few hundred, there aren't enough to naturally spawn to increase that to over 1,000 to 1,500 to start to rebuild and become self-sustaining.

That's where, in our program with the Phillips River, because the S1s had higher survivals, there were more fish that returned to spawn. Those in turn have spawned, and then the numbers returned last year, 3,500 strong. That is unbelievable. We can repeat that for all the systems.

I just want to comment on what Dave said about there being no S1s in the west coast system. I have 20 to 30 years of research data. All those systems predominantly would be S1s. There's a really good freshwater survey that was done of Bedwell River that saw a very large component of S1 chinook migrate out of the system at the beginning of April. They migrate differently. They're gone, and their survivals are extremely good.

I'll go back to the chinook. If we want to rebuild hatchery intervention, that's what's being done. However, when you take those last few remaining fish, you need to enter them into a program that has the highest survival. We know, from the coded wire tag data, that a lot of the S0s that are released are having 0.2% tag recovery. When we released our S1s, we were at 3.2% tag recovery.

Every tag captured in marine fishery represents 20% of the population, so all of a sudden you have 2% of those tags, near 10%. Our Phillips River ones were at 8.2% survival. The Sarita River and Nahmint River S0s that we released were at over 5% survival, compared to the 1% or 2% with the S0 releases. You can just simply say that we're getting 1% to 3% coming back to spawn, compared to the spawners from the S0s, which were 0.1% to 0.3% coming back. That's a huge difference.

As you keep on taking these last few eggs and you're not getting hardly any fish surviving and returning, you have to change the strategy. We've demonstrated it now with 13 releases. We have seven complete data sets.

[Bobby Morrissey, Liberal, Egmont, PE]

So—

[The Chair, Liberal, Ken McDonald]

Thank you, Mr. Morrissey. Your time has gone a little bit over.

I know that we've gotten to three rounds of questioning. We have a few minutes left, so I'm going to make an executive decision and give about two minutes, or a little over, to each party.

First off I'll go to Mr. Calkins for two minutes, because he's probably looking to get a couple of answers that he didn't get earlier.

[Blaine Calkins, Conservative, Red Deer—Lacombe, AB]

Thank you.

I have a very simple question. Given the fact that we have a wild salmon policy in Canada that differs from the Alaskan policies and some of the other international policies, which seem to go towards ocean ranching, I'm wondering if Mr. Beamish or anybody else wants to address whether our wild salmon policy nestles in, in a way, on the international front, where we can expect our wild salmon policy to be successful if we do make some changes.

The other thing I'd like to ask is this: If there were three things that the department could do as priorities in order to save salmon.... It doesn't have to be three—it could be two or five—but I want to know your top priorities. Is it removing fish farms? Is it hatchery enhancement? Is it taking nets out of the rivers? If there were a list of your priorities that you think would actually do the best amount of good for ensuring that wild Pacific salmon populations rebound, I would be curious to know what those are.

I'll start there.

Mr. Beamish, I'll leave that with you, and then we'll go to the other witnesses.