Evidence of meeting #102 for Fisheries and Oceans in the 44th Parliament, 1st session. (The original version is on Parliament’s site, as are the minutes.) The winning word was cbsa.
A recording is available from Parliament.
Liberal
The Chair Liberal Ken McDonald
For that comment, he'll have to owe you another couple of minutes at the next meeting.
Conservative
NDP
Lisa Marie Barron NDP Nanaimo—Ladysmith, BC
Thank you, Mr. Chair.
In case it wasn't heard, my button says, “I love my library”, which is a very important differentiation to make there.
Thank you to the witnesses.
Thank you to the committee for allowing me to quickly ask my questions.
I want to ask Mr. King first if he can please clarify something.
You talked about shipping directly out of the country, and I believe that was related to the mixing of illegal and legal elvers. Can you clarify that? The point wasn't finished.
Spokesperson, Canadian Committee for a Sustainable Eel Fishery Inc.
Sure, thank you. I'll go as quickly as I can.
Some seafood companies will buy our product in Canada, and then they will ship it to, say, Toronto and hold it there for a few days before ultimately shipping it to an Asian destination. In that intermediate time, they can mix our product—and I think they have—with black market elvers. If the industry as a whole agreed not to sell to anybody domestically and instead sell directly to overseas markets—if we ship them ourselves and put them on the plane—we would know that there was no black market mixing going on. It's a simple solution.
NDP
Lisa Marie Barron NDP Nanaimo—Ladysmith, BC
Thank you.
The last question I'm going to ask before I get cut off is for Ms. Carey.
To clarify, when you made calls about violence as a result of the elver harvesting and everything that we've been talking about, you were told that the RCMP does not respond to elver calls. I believe those are the exact words you used. Has there been any follow-up information provided, any resources or any additional information that you might want to add to that point?
President, Canadian Committee for a Sustainable Eel Fishery Inc.
Sure. I can say that, in chats with enforcement and Tim Kerr himself, I made known some issues in reporting. There's a 1-800 number you can call, which is another incident that I didn't even tell you about. You start at your local detachment, and nobody answers, so you phone the 1-800 number, and it rings and rings, and nobody answers. Then you phone back, and you're redirected to an RCMP switchboard, where they didn't know they were going to be receiving this call in the first place, and then they redirect you because they don't take fisheries or elver calls, and you're left with nothing.
I can say that, on more than one, two, three, even four occasions that I have phoned RCMP and DFO with no response to concerns, I have made it known in writing that the systems provided to us, those 1-800 numbers or the detachment numbers, are not working.
Liberal
The Chair Liberal Ken McDonald
Thank you, Ms. Barron. You've gone a little bit over, but not bad.
I want to say a special thank you to Ms. Carey, Mr. King and Mr. Townsend for appearing before the committee today on this important study and for sharing their knowledge and experience with the committee as we look forward to writing a report to present in the House of Commons.
With that, I'll say thank you to our interpreters, our staff and the people who made this meeting possible.
I wish everybody a good evening.
The meeting is adjourned.
