Fisheries Committee on May 30th, 2024

[The Chair, Liberal, Ken McDonald]

I call this meeting to order.

Welcome to meeting number 112 of the House of Commons Standing Committee on Fisheries and Oceans. This meeting is taking place in a hybrid format pursuant to the Standing Orders.

Before we proceed, I would like to make a few comments for the benefit of our witnesses and members. Please wait until I recognize you by name before speaking, and address all comments through the chair. I think everybody's quite familiar by now with the earpiece and where to lay it when you're not using it. Have your mic turned off when you're not using it. Keep your earpiece away from the microphones, of course. When you're not using your earpiece, place it face down on the sticker placed on the table for this purpose. Thank you for your co-operation.

Pursuant to Standing Order 108(2) and the motion adopted on June 16, 2022, the committee is resuming its study of population sustainability of Yukon salmon stocks.

I want to welcome our witnesses. We have today, from the University of Alaska Fairbanks, Mr. Peter Westley, Wakefield chair in fisheries and ocean sciences; from the Beaver Village Council, of course, Chief Rhonda Pitka; and David Curtis, documentarian and fisherman.

Thank you for taking the time to appear today. You will each have up to five minutes or less for opening statements. We will start with Peter Westley.

I want to remind members that when we get to the rounds of questioning, please identify who you are asking the question to. It will make things go smoother.

Chief Pitka, you're up for five minutes or less, please.

[Chief Rhonda Pitka, Chief, Beaver Village Council]

Oh, I'm sorry. I thought you were asking Peter Westley to start first.

[The Chair, Liberal, Ken McDonald]

I was, yes. I skipped down a line and saw your name. Forgive me for that.

Mr. Peter Westley, you have five minutes or less, please.

[Peter Westley, Lowell A. Wakefield Chair, College of Fisheries and Ocean Sciences, University of Alaska Fairbanks]

I always defer to Rhonda, but I'm happy to oblige.

Good afternoon. I'm Dr. Peter Westley. I'm an associate professor and the Wakefield endowed chair of fisheries and ocean sciences at the University of Alaska Fairbanks.

I'm joining you today from the unceded homelands of the lower Tanana Dena people, who for at least 11,000 years have stewarded these lands and waters on which the University of Alaska now resides. The Dena people have been and continue to be deeply connected with salmon that also call the Tanana River—a major tributary of the Yukon River here on the U.S. side—home. It's a privilege and honour, and a responsibility that I take very seriously, to share with you what I understand about the plight of salmon and salmon people in the Yukon.

I'll give you a bit of background. I'm a western-trained scientist. I have a bachelor's and a master's in science from the University of Washington School of Aquatic and Fishery Sciences. I have a Ph.D. in biology from Memorial University of Newfoundland.

As a lifelong Alaskan, it was a highlight of my life to live in St. John's. I lived there for five years. My son Finn was born in St. John's in 2010. My time there really underscored the vital importance of the best available science to make informed fisheries decisions and policies. As a professor here in Alaska, I teach some of those heart-wrenching lessons that were learned from the collapse of the northern cod.

I am arguably more concerned, or as concerned, with the ongoing declines of chinook salmon in the Yukon as I think people were in Newfoundland in the early 1990s. The situation is absolutely as grave. The causes of the declines are complex and complicated. They occur at different scales across time and space and they all operate in the context of a changing climate.

So I am here. I'm happy to field questions. I'm so glad for the invitation. I ultimately urge a focus on research along avenues that are actionable, where we as people have some hope of actually making a difference for salmon in our lifetime. I think it's really easy as researchers for us to propose and to do really good science, really good salmon science, but that really may not be good for the salmon, or good for the salmon and people, and I think we really need to prioritize that. I want to urge you to keep your eyes on the science that really is likely to make a difference.

Thank you again for the invitation—I look forward to the questions and the conversation and the discussion—to speak towards this really vital and ongoing crisis.

[The Chair, Liberal, Ken McDonald]

You were a bit short on time, but that's good. We will save that up and somebody will use it along the way, I'm sure.

We will now go to Chief Rhonda Pitka for an opening statement of five minutes or less, please.

[Chief Rhonda Pitka]

Good morning. I'm Rhonda Pitka. I'm the chief of the village of Beaver. I've been the chief of the village since about 2011. Beaver is a small, remote, fly-in community.

I'm also the chairwoman of the Council of Athabascan Tribal Governments, which is a consortium of nine tribal governments in the Yukon Flats area of Alaska, I sit on the Yukon River Panel and I am a federal subsistence board member.

Our people have relied on chinook salmon for millennia. We've had difficulty finding food before, but it's never been to this degree. Our food security has become so imperiled. We live in an area where the moose density is much lower, and our people have traditionally relied on moose and salmon for the majority of their diets.

I can't even begin to tell you the pain that the people on the river have felt for the last five years, as the salmon stocks have dwindled lower and lower.

Our conservation of the salmon has cost us thousands of dollars and thousands of hours in time, advocacy, man hours and policy. We've learned so many things about ocean science that I never thought I would need to know as a fisherwoman on the Yukon River.

The vast majority of our people depend so heavily on the Yukon River salmon—not only as a source of food, but as a source of culture—that the crashes have devastated our communities in a lot of different ways.

I've testified before that we've seen incredible rises in the rates of prediabetes to the point that when they started to do regular testing in our clinics, the number of those tests coming back as prediabetic was upward of 70%.

As our people are no longer allowed their traditional and cultural use of salmon and access to things that have provided health and wellness for them, we've seen so many different social effects happening with the dwindling of resources.

It's been so difficult to see the rise in domestic violence. You can see from the data yourself, when you look at it, that with the rise of domestic violence, prediabetes and all of these numerous effects, not only nutrition-wise but spiritually, people have suffered.

The backbone of our communities is often the traditional salmon fishery. We've always felt like we never had to voice these ideas in this particular way before in our advocacy, and it's been really difficult for our people on the ground to sit back and not fish for the last five years.

Right now, we're going into this seven-year moratorium. On top of the five years already, that will be a total of 12 years of not fishing for chinook on the Yukon River. It's already been devastating for our people, and it's going to continue to devastate our people.

I think that in my last testimony, I spoke briefly about the effects of the trawl fishery on the ecosystem for our people, and the fact that conservation has always been balanced on the backs of the people on the upper Yukon River and Canada. We have so much empathy for our relatives on the Canadian side of the border. They've faced much longer declines in the salmon than we have, and it's devastating to watch them also struggle through that.

Many of our children have not fished in their lifetime. I'm concerned now that some of our elders won't be able to fish within the rest of their lifetime either. The devastation of the Yukon River salmon fishery has been so detrimental to the health and wellness of our people.

At the same time, we can watch our governments do things like subsidize the commercial salmon fishery by buying commercial salmon under food programs, instead of finding more sustainable ways to fish for salmon themselves. Instead, they place the onus and the burden of conservation on the backs of the indigenous people of the Yukon River.

I'd like to thank you all for inviting me again. I was so worried that in my last testimony I probably offended most of the Canadian House of Commons and I would never be invited back.

I thank you all so much for your time today. I appreciate it.

[The Chair, Liberal, Ken McDonald]

That is not a problem.

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

[David Curtis, Documentarian and Fisherman, As an Individual]

Hello, my name is David Curtis. I am joining you today from the traditional territories of the Tr’ondëk Hwëch’in First Nation, on whose lands I have had the honour to live for the past 27 years.

I first worked as a field technician on a number of salmon studies within the Klondike region in the early 2000s. This work brought me into direct contact with salmon and their environments. For example, one of my tasks was snorkelling down the Klondike River to assess male to female ratios, which brought me within centimetres of living salmon. My passion for all things salmon has only increased since those days.

I later became involved with salmon as a food source when I acquired a commercial fishing licence. Unfortunately, this coincided with the tail end of a viable chinook fishery. When it closed in 2010, I shifted my efforts to harvesting fall chum and developed a small business sustainably fishing them for local consumption. Fishing allowed me to remain engaged with salmon while helping address food security in the face of climate change. Sadly, with the catastrophic collapse of the chum run in 2020, I haven't been able to harvest any salmon for over four years.

Many important points have been raised and eloquently addressed by previous witnesses, especially regarding the possible causes of the decline of Yukon River salmon. I will not repeat these, but instead will focus on issues regarding the human-fish interface that often goes unaddressed, yet are the very things we can do something about, such as fishing practices and commercial fishing in particular.

When considering the decline of the Yukon River salmon, a lot of energy and resources continue to be expended on contributing factors that we have little or no short-term control over—climate change, diseases, increasing water temperatures, salinity and changes in the ocean food chain, etc. Amongst these worthy conversations, little is said about the history, evolution and cumulative impacts that commercial fisheries have had along the river, [Technical difficulty—Editor] gear and techniques used.

There can be no denying that the cumulative effects of previous harvest practices have had detrimental impacts, not only on the number, but also, and probably more importantly, on the quality of fish making it to the spawning grounds.

From the 1840s until now, there has been some form of a commercial fishery in the Yukon River. Over this time, distinctly different management regimes have evolved between Yukon and Alaska. One thing they share is the commercial fishers' desire to maximize their yield in relation to management decisions. Commercial fishing has often been practised without direct concern for long-term impacts on the resource—at least not until returns approached the tipping point of potential extirpation.

The Atlantic cod fishery is an excellent example, amongst others, of how conventional management regimes based primarily on commercial fishing interests have failed the very resource they are set up to protect.

With this in mind, I'd like to stress that it has been known for quite some time that there is a direct correlation between the type of gear used by commercial fishers to target specific age groups for size, weight and sex that, if left unregulated, will lead to the demise of the resource.

I'll quote from C. E. Walker's 1976 study of Yukon salmon for Environment Canada's fisheries and marine service, in which he raises concerns about the potential extinction of chinook salmon. Remember, this is 1976:

A change toward heavier use of gillnets, particularly with larger size mesh, will increase the catch of female chinook salmon. This has two advantages to the fisherman: it increases the weight of catch and provides roe which in itself has high value on the market. Increased exploitation of female chinook salmon may threaten the salmon population with extinction.

Communities along the upper portion of the river, along with scientists and activists, have for decades been sounding the alarm about how chinook salmon are on the precipice of extinction. They have called for commercial harvesting practices, especially in the fishery at the mouth, to be changed if a total collapse is to be averted.

While I am in total support of the indigenous-led initiative for a moratorium on harvesting of chinook for one full life cycle, I hope this will be accompanied by plans to conduct low- and no-harm monitoring studies of the run for the duration of the moratorium.

The moratorium, while being important unto itself, provides a rare opportunity to conclusively determine whether harvesting practices have negatively impacted the chinook runs. Even though this moratorium impacts my ability to harvest fish for my community, any personal loss this represents is dwarfed by the massive sacrifice this entails for every community along the Yukon River.

I am hopeful that this agreement, your work on this study and its recommendation signal a shift in management policies towards ones that integrate both traditional and scientific practices to increase the health of the salmon population and, in turn, all the people who live along the Yukon River.

Thank you very much.

[The Chair, Liberal, Ken McDonald]

Thank you for that.

Before I go to questions, I want to mention that, of course, we want to welcome Mr. Green of the NDP back to committee and Mr. Kurek and Mr Epp—who seems to have lost some weight—for the Conservative party, but I'm sure he'll be recognised somewhere along the way.

We'll now go to our questions. Again, I'd like to remind questioners to identify who their question is for.

We'll go to Mr. Arnold first for six minutes or less.

Yes, I knew Mr Epp would show up sooner or later.

Thank you, Mr Epp. You're just in time.

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

Thank you, Mr Chair.

I believe I'll start with Mr Curtis. It sounds like you've done a lot of field work with salmon and possibly other species. I'd like to touch base on the evolution of species and natural selection, whereby it's often the weakest that are taken out by the group by predators and so on, leaving the strongest to survive. We've heard about how there used to be large chinook salmon—70 to 90-plus pounds—in that system and the benefits of those larger females' laying more eggs and larger healthier eggs.

What do you see has happened in the system in your time there?

[David Curtis]

From my time fishing and also working as a habitat technician, and also from the history of other fishers whom I've talked to on both sides of the border, there has been a continuing decrease in the size and weight of the fish returning, at least onto the Canadian side of the border.

There are a number of different reasons for this, I think, but one of the potential ones that is really important to keep in mind is the targeting of large fish through large mesh nets for decades at a time, which scientifically has proven to be detrimental to the health of a run. As you mentioned, the larger the fish, the more fecund the fish, the better the returns. Also, a thing to understand, as well, as many people pointed out, is that this is a very long system. In the Yukon River itself, the salmon run is over 3,000 kilometres. That's the distance some of these fish go. You need large fish to make the return that far up the river. It just only really makes sense. The larger the fish, the more reserves it has, the more muscle mass it has to be able to make that long journey.

I hope that answered your question.

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

That leads to the next question: What could be done to ensure that those large fish make it through if and when—I will say “when” because I believe in being positive about this—stocks are returned to abundance? How can we ensure that those large fish that are important to the evolution and the continuation, the sustainability...? How can we operate to make sure that happens?

[David Curtis]

Yes, that's a very good point and a good question, and it's one that I think really comes down to management, rigorous management programs that consider the mesh size, the fishing techniques, the lengths of nets and things like that used throughout the fishery. I'm speaking primarily to commercial fisheries, but I think, as well, that all fisheries should be considering this as part of moving forward. We have a moratorium now, which I think is a fantastic move towards rebuilding the stocks. However, as I said in my opening statements, I think it's also an incredible opportunity to understand better what effect these fishing practices have had over time on this run and to possibly work towards rectifying that.

There are a number of different ways that this could be done, but the key one here, I think, is just having a really solid understanding of that relationship between mesh size, the way in which it targets specific sizes of fish and how that needs to be managed in a way in which we no longer do that. So, using smaller mesh nets is one way of doing that.

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

Okay, if I can—quickly—I want to get on to another question as well. The mesh size now.... Is that in reference to in-river or marine fisheries or both?

[David Curtis]

That's in reference to in-river specifically. That's what I'm talking about.

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

Thank you.

I'd like to move on now to Chief Pitka.

Chief, you've mentioned that food security is becoming a challenge. Seven years or more now without salmon is certainly concerning. What plans have been put in place, or what work has been done to replace the loss of harvested salmon for your people?

[Chief Rhonda Pitka]

One of our largest regional non-profits in our area, Tanana Chiefs Conference, has donated hundreds of thousands of dollars of sockeye salmon to our area from Bristol Bay. Oftentimes they would come in, and we would have these whole frozen salmon. That's one thing that they've done.

I'm not sure how well you know the State of Alaska system right now, but within the last year or so, they've had backlogs of up to eight months for review of the food assistance programs, the SNAP, that they operate. There have been people who haven't even been able to access food cards in Alaska.

We've tried numerous ways to contract some of those programs and make sure that some of those processes work better for our people, but that's not a really great long-term solution, flying in fish from other areas, and it's not sustainable for a lot of our people.

The freight costs in our area are pretty outrageous. It's upwards of 50¢ a pound. You know, if you have five sockeye salmon, they're at minimum 15 pounds apiece, so it can be very, very expensive and very, very unwieldy to fly in salmon, especially to people who are very used to fending for themselves, taking care of themselves and being able to fish for themselves.

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

Thank you.

[The Chair, Liberal, Ken McDonald]

Thank you, Mr. Arnold.

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

[Brendan Hanley, Liberal, Yukon, YT]

Thank you.

I want to first thank all three of you for coming. I hope to have questions for each of you.

Chief Pitka, congratulations on your niece's graduation, and welcome back to the committee. You're certainly welcome.

I want to start with Mr. Curtis.

David, you and I have had many salmon conversations over the last couple of years. I want to allow you to talk specifically about chum salmon and the significance of the collapse—perhaps a more recent collapse—of the chum fishery and how we may have overlooked that somewhat in our focus on chinook salmon, but also the interplay, you know, the effect on the overall ecosystem and the interplay between chum salmon and chinook salmon survival and sustainability.

[David Curtis]

Chum salmon are something that I feel very passionately about as well. There was a collapse in 2020 from one year to the next, where approximately 13% of the run returned of the 10-year average. That was a very serious and catastrophic collapse that happened essentially within a one-year cycle. That continues. The chum have not recovered in any way, to my understanding. I think that 19% was the highest of the returns that came across the border.

Chum are often overlooked because they're not traditionally as important a food source. They were harvested a lot for dog teams in the past. I did a lot of work in early 2010 to bring it back as a table food within our community as a local wild protein source.

They're also very, very important, as you mentioned, MP Hanley, to the environment. The thing that often gets overlooked that Chief Pitka brought up, which I really appreciated, is that the entire ecosystem depends upon these salmon coming back—chinook, chum and coho—for their health and well-being. This is a watershed that is estimated to be 25% larger than the province of Alberta or the state of Alaska. It's a massive ecosystem that has depended upon the salmon for its health and well-being forever. Having these species go extinct in such short order will, I'm sure, have devastating knock-on effects for the environment. That's something that causes me great concern for future generations.

[Brendan Hanley, Liberal, Yukon, YT]

Thank you for that.

Hopefully, I'll come back to you later. I just want to move to Professor Westley for a couple of minutes.

I want to ask you something, Professor Westley. It's very interesting that you're drawing a parallel, not a surprising one, with the Atlantic cod fishery collapse. Can you elaborate a little more on where you see our potentially going with the Yukon River salmon vis-à-vis the history of the Atlantic cod fishery? Where might be the points of intervention that can prevent this happening? You sound not very optimistic. I wonder where we can usefully intervene at this point.

[Peter Westley]

I really appreciate that question.

I think it was MP Arnold who was saying he wanted to stay optimistic. I, too, try to remain optimistic, but you also need to be realistic. My opinion has continued to change as the evidence has continued to change and as the runs have continued to decline. Ten years ago, I probably would have given you a different answer on where I think things are at. I'm gravely concerned.

I'll just start off by mentioning some of the parallels that I see in broad strokes between northern cod and salmon.

At the time, there were questions about whether the collapse of cod was a climate story or an overfishing story. There were different views of the world. And, of course, the answer to that is it was the interaction between the two. The fishery vastly overharvested northern cod by number, but also the diversity of those cod was greatly reduced, and we've been talking about that. To be clear, for the chinook story, in particular, as the numbers have gone down, so too have the size and numbers of eggs and the depth to which females can dig nests, all these things that are tied to things we think are influencers of productivity and survival.

A lot of that diversity had been lost, and then in the context of a changing climate—Newfoundland is always cold, and it got really cold in the early 1990s—the cod stock then did not have the built-in resiliency and diversity to withstand that shifting environment, and it led to a collapse.

I think there is something to that in terms of the parallelism here. We do have a changing climate, and it's undeniable. It's a fact. We have lost the numbers and we have lost the quality, the size. That is a huge component of concern.

What can we do about that? This came up in a bit of the previous question about natural selection and so forth. Some of the real challenges, as we know, are that the age and size at which salmon mature is in large part controlled by genetics. There are environmental controls on that, but there's also a genetic control. For a chinook salmon to be really big requires them to spend a lot of time in the ocean, and there is some genetic control over when fish decide to mature. They're not cognitively thinking it through, but they are genetically programmed as to when, given size and age, they will transition to become mature.

And partly because of, yes, absolutely—

[The Chair, Liberal, Ken McDonald]

Thank you for that. We've gone a little bit over time. I have to move on.

We'll now go to Madame Desbiens for six minutes or less, please.

[Caroline Desbiens, Bloc, Beauport—Côte-de-Beaupré—Île d’Orléans—Charlevoix, QC]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

I'd like to thank the witnesses for their valuable presence.

Mr. Westley spoke to us not only about the problems associated with the run, but also about all the factors that led to the outcome we're seeing today.

Mr. Westley, to what extent has the Department of Fisheries and Oceans, in past years, taken note of the deterioration and realities you're telling us about today? You say it's a combination of factors that have been adding up for several years. To what extent has the Department of Fisheries and Oceans, which manages these fisheries, reacted? Has it reacted in any way?