Fisheries Committee on May 26th, 2021

[The Vice-Chair, Conservative, Richard Bragdon]

Thank you, Madam Gill, and thank you, Mr. Davis.

We'll go to Mr. Johns for the final one-minute segment.

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

Thank you, Mr. Chair. I appreciate getting the chance to ask this question.

We are talking about deep-freezing 10-pound containers, but they come in one-pound tubs. With regard to the three-tub recommendation you are putting forward for this season, if you had put that forward for future years, we probably wouldn't be studying this issue right now, because clearly that's an easy solution.

You cited that there were two violations on average a year. How many of those violations on size limits were frozen-at-sea prawns? Also, was the minister fully briefed and supportive of this decision moving forward, which has put everyone's livelihood up in the air?

[Rebecca Reid]

Nicole can respond to this statistical question, but as far as the issue around interpretation of the regulation is concerned, certainly once industry flagged its concern, we did advise the minister. She is aware, and you are aware, that there is a news release responding to the outcome of the process that was arrived at.

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

That's for this year, but not for future years.

[Rebecca Reid]

The intent is to continue to work with the industry for future years. We haven't precluded an outcome. We haven't said it's going to be this or that. We're going to work with industry on developing that solution.

[The Vice-Chair, Conservative, Richard Bragdon]

Thank you, Ms. Reid, and thank you, Mr. Johns. Thank you, everyone—

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

Mr. Chair, could I just get an answer to the question I asked about the violations?

On average, of the two violations a year, how many were frozen-at-sea prawns?

[Nicole Gallant]

Both of them were, and when they were inspected, 51% of the prawn in the frozen tubs in one of the violations was undersized.

[The Vice-Chair, Conservative, Richard Bragdon]

Thank you.

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

I have a point of order, Mr. Chair.

[The Vice-Chair, Conservative, Richard Bragdon]

Go ahead, Mr. Calkins.

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

Before we adjourn this section of the meeting, I want to ensure that the commitments made by the witnesses during this portion of the committee will be met. The witnesses suggested that they could provide answers if it were the committee's willingness to want them. I would like the witnesses to interpret that as a “yes”. We don't ask questions as members of Parliament unless we actually want answers to them.

Mr. Chair, before this particular discussion is over with these witnesses, I want to say that it's been a long time since I've seen what appears to be such indifference to the questions that have been asked by members of Parliament and the deference that wasn't given to those questions. The attitude that we were just simply asking the wrong questions and that we needed to ask better questions seemed to be the response of the witnesses, rather than actually answering the questions that were asked.

I find this to be appalling behaviour in the presence of members of Parliament and I would hope that we don't see this again.

[The Vice-Chair, Conservative, Richard Bragdon]

Thank you, Mr. Calkins.

I'd like to thank the witnesses for being a part of the meeting this evening. Thank you to each one.

We're going to take a brief suspension of the meeting. Don't go anywhere, those of you who are members. We're going to have the next witnesses come online and do their sound checks right away, and then we will proceed into the next segment.

Thank you, everyone.

[The Vice-Chair, Conservative, Richard Bragdon]

I call the second part of the meeting to order.

I'd like to thank the witnesses for joining us this evening and I would like to take a few minutes, for the benefit of our next witnesses, to go over a few instructions.

When you are ready to speak, click on the microphone icon to activate your mike. When you are not speaking, your mike should be on mute.

Interpretation will work very much as in a regular committee meeting. You have a choice at the bottom of your screen of either “Floor“, “English” or “French”. When speaking, please speak slowly and clearly.

I would now like to welcome our second panel of witnesses.

From Skipper Otto's Community Supported Fishery, we have Sonia Strobel, co-founder and chief executive officer.

From the Native Fishing Association, we have Andy Olson, executive director.

From the Prawn Industry Caucus, we have Ivan Askgaard, commercial fisherman.

We will now hear opening remarks, beginning with Ms. Strobel for five minutes or less, please.

[Sonia Strobel, Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer, Skipper Otto Community Supported Fishery]

Thank you so much for having me.

As you said, my name is Sonia Strobel. I'm the co-founder and CEO of Skipper Otto. We're Canada's first community-supported fishery and one of the first in the world. We're based on Coast Salish territory here in Vancouver, B.C.

I married into a fishing family 20 years ago. Honestly, I was horrified to witness the struggles of my father-in-law, Otto, and my husband Sean and other small-scale harvesters. They face risks and uncertainties that no one would tolerate in any other livelihood. At the end of the day, a lot of them just hope to break even. They're barely paying themselves minimum wage.

At the same time, Canadians can scarcely access domestic seafood. Canada exports 90% of its catch, and 80% of what Canadians can buy in restaurants and in retail shops is imported, often from shady sources that support environmental destruction and human rights abuses in unregulated international waters, yet demand for local producer-direct seafood continues to skyrocket.

We started Skipper Otto to help take some of the uncertainty out of fishing and to address Canadian food insecurity. Our membership model provides frozen seafood directly from fishing families to consumers across Canada. We do lots of other things to de-risk fishing, but since this is what's core to the issue today, that's where I'll focus my remarks.

Freezing seafood allows harvesters to hold on to their product and find their own fair markets rather than being forced to sell to live buyers and export markets that won't set a price until long after they've taken the product. Monopolization and collusion are commonplace in this industry. Right now, we're two weeks into the spot prawn season. Folks selling into the live markets have already delivered the bulk of this year's catch, but they still haven't been told a price, let alone been paid a penny.

Not only is allowing the freezing of seafood like spot prawns, at sea a social justice issue; it's also critical to improving other issues like food security, tackling climate change and addressing seafood fraud. Our model allows members to enjoy sustainable seafood year-round anywhere in the country. It's shipped using low-carbon methods, and each piece of seafood shows exactly who caught it, when, where and how.

This committee has heard testimony from many harvesters about the impact of selling frozen-at-sea spot prawn tails domestically compared to selling to live markets. Last year, that meant that harvesters who tailed, tubbed and froze their prawns at sea sold them for 300% more than they received from selling them to the live buyer.

Skipper Otto supports 34 fishing families, like Joel Collier here, throughout the B.C. coast, as well as in two remote communities in Nunavut. These families provide a year's worth of seafood directly to over 7,000 families across the country. You heard from many of them through our petitions on this topic.

Our members are passionate about supporting Canadian fishing families. They do that by buying fishermen-direct frozen seafood. This spot prawn issue hits them personally, and they're not going to let it drop.

In Canada, shrimp and prawns are by far the most consumed species of seafood. Globally, some five billion pounds of shrimp and prawns are produced each year. Where does most of that come from?

The global shrimp and prawn trade is the most notorious for environmental destruction and human rights abuses. Most of the frozen shrimp you can get in Canadian grocery stores is in some way connected to human trafficking, slavery and deforestation of mangroves in southeast Asia. How wonderful, then, that we have this incredibly clean, well-managed, ethically harvested product as an alternative for consumers in Canada to displace some of that dirty product.

However, this reinterpretation of the regulation about spot prawn tubbing undoes all of that. It takes from fishing families one of the most profitable fisheries they have in a industry that's desperately difficult to make money in. Once again it puts the control and profits back into the hands of big foreign-owned export companies. It takes a sustainable, clean and ethical product out of the hands of Canadians and makes more space for slave-caught shrimp on Canadian shelves. For what? The DFO has not provided a single plausible reason for this decision. Of course, we all support strong conservation measures, but it has not been demonstrated that this is in any way a conservation issue.

Of course, we all want to put an end to IUU fishing and harvesting, but placing the burden of that on all harvesters is unjust and irrational. If a small group of harvesters and processors are violating regulations, then C and P—conservation and protection—already has the tools in place to focus the enforcement of the regulations without upending the entire industry. Their job is to enforce regulations made by arms-length lawmakers, not to reinvent the laws to make enforcement easier.

Please help me to tell our 7,000 member families across the country that this is solved. They are all eagerly awaiting the update on this issue, not just for this year but for the future as well.

In conclusion, I submit the following recommendations: one, that you give certainty to harvesters that tailing, tubbing and freezing prawns at sea will remain legal; and two, that you ensure that our local prawn harvest is protected for Canadian harvesters and consumers, not for the benefit of foreign corporations and investors.

[The Vice-Chair, Conservative, Richard Bragdon]

Thank you, Ms. Strobel. I appreciate that.

Now we're going to go to Mr. Olson for five minutes.

[Andy Olson, Executive Director, Native Fishing Association]

Good afternoon, committee members and Chair.

Thanks for having us to speak about this issue today. My name is Andrew Olson, and I am the executive director of the Native Fishing Association. We're an aboriginal financial institution based in West Vancouver that serves aboriginal indigenous fishers all over B.C. through loans, licences and other business assistance, as we can.

Previously, before I took my job at the Native Fishing Association, I worked for the Tseshaht First Nation in Port Alberni as a fisheries manager and fish biologist for 10 years. In that role, I served as a first nations representative on the prawn advisory board for many years and worked with the prawn advisory board and prawn advisory committee, which is what it was before it became the prawn advisory board. I participated in many of those discussions and much of that work, and I never heard of undersized prawns being an issue. This is an issue that to me points to some of the other concerns in the Pacific region, in that DFO is being manipulated and used by business, industry in particular.

When they talk about industry, they talk about the PPFA. They are not the industry. That is the commercial processor group of representatives, not the representatives of the independent commercial fishers, who are represented by the Prawn Industry Caucus. That's one thing we need to be clear about. When they're talking about industry, they're referring to the Pacific Prawn Fishermen's Association. Those are two different groups with different participants, and in many instances, that larger organization represents the processing companies that are taking live prawns and shipping them to Asia for a lucrative market.

This shift for fishers wasn't just into tailing and tubbing prawns. It's been a shift to live prawn sales at the dock, which has turned the market around for these guys. Their opportunity to fish.... Even with a strong foreign market to ship the seafood to, the fishers were not getting the benefit of that strong foreign market price. The fishers haven't been making a high living off of that market and then having to shift to a lesser market domestically. The domestic market has proven to be able to bear the prices that are potentially higher than what the international market is providing to the fishers, so it's not just a temporary shift. I think it's a long-term shift.

One of the things I heard in the earlier panel discussion was a lot about sustainability and size issues and those kinds of things. It's clear that the committee understands all of those things and is trying to understand what's at the root of this issue and how we can work to support fishers to make a living and to protect the resource—which I think we all think is important—so that they can keep fishing.

We know that the size of the prawns is more of a marketability issue than it is a conservation issue and that there is not a sustainability concern in harvesting undersized prawns, because they're all males. Knowing that, we start to look at what's behind all this stuff, and that's what concerns me the most. We've seen processes and even enforcement programs manipulated by large shareholder corporations again and again in the Pacific region, many of them foreign-owned. They use their levers and the people they have influence with to change policy and change the way that the fisheries are managed through enforcement action, causing things to essentially shift immediately.

They realized they were going to lose access to all these prawns because fishermen saw that they could sell the prawns domestically and make more money selling prawns to their neighbours and friends than selling prawns to a commercial fish plant that is going to pack them into a box and send them to China. All of a sudden, when fish companies started to see that they were going to lose access to a product that was making them millions of dollars when they sent it overseas, they had to do something.

That's my concern. It's that this change points to that kind of thing and that kind of corruption in the Pacific region. We need to get to the bottom of this and we need to make sure that the fishermen have an opportunity to make a living. That's critically important.

[The Vice-Chair, Conservative, Richard Bragdon]

Thank you, Mr. Olson, we appreciate that.

Now we're going to go to our final witness testimony, which is from Mr. Askgaard for five minutes or less.

[Ivan Askgaard, Commercial Fisherman, Prawn Industry Caucus]

Thank you, Mr. Chairman, and hello all committee members. I really appreciate being asked to speak today.

My name is Ivan Askgaard. I am a commercial fisherman. I have fished for 40 years for prawns. I own a prawn licence and operate a fishing vessel, and I also have a registered storage facility where we are licensed to freeze our prawn tails.

I served on the prawn sectoral committee in the eighties and the nineties, where we collaborated with DFO to implement larger mesh size, increase the minimum size, and implement many other measures to make the fishery more sustainable. I recall that the telson length measurement was established back then so that prawn tails frozen in seawater could become a viable product. I would have to say at this point that consultation back then was far more effective than what we're seeing today.

For years I was investing in technology to catch more fish. A number of years ago we hit a ceiling for what we could catch. We reached the conclusion that the way to survive was by adding value to the catch by improving its quality, its convenience for the consumer and its consistency. We have invested in Internet marketing, packaging, cold storage and distribution systems. I have to say that not all fishermen have reached the stage of advancement that we have. We're independent and we're forward-thinking.

I also have to say that we feel privileged to be able to harvest the common property fishery resource of Canadians. Canadians rely on us to provide them with food and access to something that they in fact own but trust us to harvest, and because licensed commercial fishermen rely on the goodwill of Canadians for access to the resource, we've made a point of making some of our catch available to the public over the last 30 or 40 years. It's not only tremendously satisfying; it's good business. There has come to be so little seafood available direct from the fishermen, even in our little coastal town of Powell River, that our customers routinely thank us profusely for making our product available to them. It's a strong market.

For the 2020 and 2021 prawn fishing seasons, the markets have endured another cyclical crash in the markets for frozen whole prawns for export to Japan and China, where 80% to 90% of our production is destined. The poor prices on this occasion have been blamed on COVID. An earlier witness mentioned extensive collusion in the industry among buyers, and I can reaffirm that fact. Fishermen received as little as $3 a pound for their smallest-sized product last year. Their medium prawns sold into the frozen seafood market at $3 a pound. That's less than the cost of production, I can tell you. This year looks to be the same. Fishermen are trying to make any kind of move they can to avoid financial ruin.

The market crash has promoted innovation by fishermen to adapt. We want to be able to have certainty and we want to be able to adapt. We're not looking for any kind of a financial handout, but we do want some certainty. We're trying to create higher-value markets by producing frozen prawn tails and selling directly to the public. I can say that this is a long-time practice and one that we have gone to when we've had poor markets in the past. When I first started fishing back in the eighties, there were people back then selling frozen prawn tails. That's how long this practice has gone on. It's not a recent practice.

This reinterpretation of the policy is not a conservation issue. It's solving a problem that doesn't exist. It's so unjust that my outrage is the reason I'm appearing here today. There have been no recent charges for fishermen for retaining undersized prawns. We've heard one of the earlier witnesses say that it was about two a year. I think there was some confusion there. There were two charges in 2019 to my knowledge, and there have been none in 2020 or 2021 for undersized prawns, although there have been many other charges laid in the fishery. I've spoken with a fisheries officer who says that retention of undersized prawn tails in tubs by commercial fishermen is the least of their concerns.

I can tell you from practical experience that identifying a fisherman who has retained undersized prawns is a relatively simple matter, all this talk of thawing tubs aside. The tried and true enforcement technique is for the rubber boat to arrive seemingly out of nowhere and an impromptu investigation occurs of the product that is retained on deck. Timed at the end of a haul of a string of traps, DFO can easily go through a large amount of product—about one-sixth or more of that vessel's daily catch—to get a clear assessment of what is being retained by the vessel.

Any amount—

[The Vice-Chair, Conservative, Richard Bragdon]

Thank you, Mr. Askgaard. I'm sorry; our time is complete.

If you have more you'd like to add, feel free to send that in to us as well. Some of it will maybe come out in the time of questioning, but our time has lapsed on that. I'm sorry.

We appreciate hearing from each of you.

Now we are going to our question-and-answer period, and I'm going to ask Mr. Calkins to go first.

You now have six minutes or less for questions.

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

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

I want to thank our witnesses for being here today.

I have you all on my screen. Can you raise your hands if you heard the department officials in the hour just before you came on? Raise your hand if you were able to hear them. Okay.

My question first, then, is for all of you. We'll start in the order in which you presented before, so it will be Ms. Strobel, Mr. Olson and then Mr. Askgaard.

Do you believe anything that the department officials said was an accurate and fair reflection of the relationship you've had with the Department of Fisheries and Oceans with regard to the whole issue surrounding prawn tubbing?

[Sonia Strobel]

No. I don't believe that is a fair assessment. I don't feel that we have been consulted at all. I feel that the DFO consults with the large industry association, which Mr. Olson referred to as representing the large-scale, largely export companies, but they have not consulted with us in any way.

Their characterization of having consulted early on is strictly false. I have all the dates of when this information was released. On March 3, the Pacific Prawn Fishermen's Association first notified us. On March 12, we initiated a petition; on March 26, we initiated a House of Commons petition. At that point, they still hadn't said that prawn tailing at sea would be legal this year.They were still saying it would be illegal this year and that they would take a stance of educate, inform and not enforce, or something to that effect.

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

Thank you.

Mr. Olson, what is your response? Did the department fairly and accurately reflect the nature of the conversations in relationship with what's actually happening on the water?

[Andy Olson]

No. In my experience, in the discussion that they had, they did not.

They talked about their interaction with industry. As I mentioned earlier, the industry they are referring to is a large association that generally is controlled by processors that send fish overseas and not the commercial fishermen.

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

Mr. Askgaard, would you comment?