Thank you, Mr. Chair.
I think it's very relevant that this committee be well informed in order to do a comprehensive review of the Fisheries Act as we've been directed.
I move the following motion:
That following the committee’s completion of its studies of Abandoned and Derelict Vessels, Northern Cod, and following the Minister’s appearance on October 9, 2024; and that in order for the committee to conduct a comprehensive review of the Fisheries Act; that the committee will not begin the Fisheries Act review until it has received from the Department of Fisheries and Oceans (DFO) comprehensive briefings updating the committee on the actions and work completed for implementing recommendations the committee provided to the Government in the following reports:
(a) "Closure of the Comox MCTS Station of the Canadian Coast Guard" (tabled May 6, 2016);
(b) "Wild Atlantic salmon in Eastern Canada" (tabled January 30, 2017);
(c) "Review of Changes Made in 2012 to the Fisheries Act: Enhancing the Protection of Fish and Fish Habitat and the Management of Canadian Fisheries" (tabled February 24, 2017);
(d) "Newfoundland and Labrador's Northern Cod Fishery: Charting a New Sustainable Future" (tabled June 19, 2017);
(e) "The Oceans Act's Marine Protected Areas" (tabled June 11, 2018);
(f) "Atlantic Canada Commercial Vessel Length and Licensing Policies" (tabled June 19, 2018);
(g) "Current State of Department of Fisheries and Oceans' Small Craft Harbours" (tabled June 20, 2019);
(h) "Regulation of the West Coast Fisheries" (tabled February 8, 2019);
(i) "Impact of the Rapid Increase of the Striped Bass in the Miramichi River and the Gulf of St. Lawrence" (tabled May 28, 2019);
(j) "Aquatic Invasive Species" (tabled June 17, 2019);
(k) "Migration of Lobster and Snow Crab in Atlantic Canada and the Impact of Changes to Lobster Carapace Size" (tabled June 17, 2019);
(l) "Implementation of Mi’kmaq Treaty Fishing Rights to Support a Moderate" Livelihood (tabled May 13, 2021);
(m) "State of the Pacific Salmon" (tabled June 21, 2021);
(n) "Traceability of Fish and Seafood Products" (tabled June 15, 2022);
(o) "Marine Cargo Container Spills" (tabled October 6, 2022);
(p) "Science at the Department of Fisheries and Oceans" (tabled March 9, 2023);
(q) "North Atlantic Right Whale" (tabled April 8, 2023);
(r) "Allocation of Resources to the Great Lakes Fisheries Commission" (tabled November 29, 2023);
(s) "Foreign Ownership and Corporate Concentration of Fishing Licenses and Quota" (tabled December 13, 2023);
(t) "Ecosystem Impacts and Management of Pinniped Populations" (tabled December 13, 2023;
(u) "Plans to Prevent Violence During the 2024 Elver Fishing Season" (tabled May 23, 2024).
I will ask if the interpretation was working adequately for our Bloc member and if she was able to grasp all of the motion.
I don't hear any opposition.
Mr. Chair, I make this motion because this committee has done tremendous work in the nine years that I've been involved in it. You've been involved on this committee with a number of others, including Mr. Hardie and Mr. Morrissey. We've spent nine years on this committee providing recommendations to a department.
I believe it's the senior head of the department who has not responded to these reports and recommendations in an adequate way. There are many of these reports where the responses have been.... Basically, we felt they were dismissive to this committee and our work.
More than dismissive to the committee members, the department was dismissive to the fisheries community, the harvesters and the first nations—the people who came in and took time out of their lives to participate in our meetings and testify. Some of them were testifying to the point that they were so emotional that we had to take a break. They had tears in their eyes. Some of them were concerned for their livelihoods and for their families. Some of them were concerned for their communities that rely on the sustainable management of Canada's fisheries.
The reason some of these reports have been done.... I will say that a lot of these reports were put forward by members of the Liberal Party because they identified issues and concerns.
The commercial vessel length study was put forward by you, Mr. Chair. We spent time on that. We heard about the problems it was creating and the safety issues it was creating for the harvesters. They were basically trying to find a way to survive in an industry that has been put aside for too long.
There were lists of recommendations in these reports. Some were minimal, with six or 10 recommendations. Other reports contained 35 or 40-plus recommendations for a department. These were not just for a department, but for a minister.
In this case, there were six different ministers to respond to. I don't know of any other department that has seen such a turnover in ministers. I can't say that it's gotten any better with time. It simply hasn't gotten any better with time.
It's not just this committee that's been raising the concerns. There have been reports from the commissioner of the environment and sustainable development. In 2016 there was a report that the department had not developed fisheries management plans. That had been a promise from the department from the 1990s. The department's response to the commissioner's report was that it would commit to developing a plan to develop plans. These are plans that should have been developed more than a decade earlier.
I'll quote from a 2023 report that said, “Overall, Fisheries and Oceans Canada remained unable to collect the dependable and timely catch data that it needs to sustainably manage commercial marine fisheries and protect Canada's fish stocks.”
Those aren't my words. Those are the words of the commissioner of the environment and sustainable development to the Parliament of Canada, whose job it is to audit the government and the government department on what it says it's going to do. We heard that from the commissioner when she testified to this committee. Many members in this committee may, and should, remember that. The commissioner only audits the government on what it says it is going to do and what it commits to do.
That report I just read saying that the department doesn't have the timely catch data that it needs to sustainably manage commercial marine fisheries and protect Canada's fish stocks was from 2023. The audit goes on to say that, “The type of data collected includes the quantity of catch and the bycatch species and the biological characteristics (length, weight, or sex) of the fish harvested.”
It goes on to say that, “We audited this area in 2016, and 7 years later, we found that Fisheries and Oceans Canada has yet to deliver on most of the corrective measures that it committed to in its response to our recommendations.”
I will say that those recommendations were from 2016. This report, seven years later, said that the department had not followed through on those measures. It goes on to say, "For example, while the department now has the Fishery Monitoring Policy, the policy was not supported by plans or resources, and it has not been implemented. Many important monitoring requirements that would improve the timeliness, and dependability of catch data remain absent or incomplete."
Mr. Chair, I'll speak again about the reports and the witness testimony that we've heard many times that the department doesn't know what the biomass is out there, what the catch data is and what the returns are. They cannot manage what they have not been able to measure. They have not put the measures in place to measure what is out there. I will go on to say and quote from this 2023 report. It states:
On the modernization of the department's information management systems—also a commitment made in 2016— progress has been slow. The department has spent some $31 million to improve its outdated system to have one that would integrate all of the regions and provide ready access to catch data, but the department has delivered only the initial modules of this new system and has pushed its timeline for delivery across all regions from 2020 to 2030.
That's an additional 10 years' time. Moreover,
As a result, the department still does not have a complete picture about the amount of fish harvested and their biological characteristics to make informed decisions.
Without dependable and timely catch data, the department does not have the important information it needs to support sustainable management of fisheries, and it runs the risk that fish stocks are overexploited. The collapse of the Atlantic cod in the 1990s—with its far-reaching economic and social impacts—has shown that the recovery of fish stocks is far more difficult and resource intensive than keeping any species' numbers at a healthy level.
Mr. Chair, I did not tally these up, but it has to be 20-plus reports that we have completed in this committee in the nine years that you and I and others have been members of this committee. Most of those reports were unanimous. It's gotten to the point now where there have been supplemental reports because even those reports were not as critical of the government and the department as other parties thought they should be. The responses to those reports have not been comprehensive. They've really been just a matter of passing the buck or shuffling it down the road hoping that we would not come back to it.
Early in this Parliament, I believe it was Mr. Hardie who put forward a motion that the committee undertake quarterly briefings from the department on previous reports that had been submitted and the recommendations. I believe it was supported by all members. It was certainly supported by all parties.
The first one of those we did—I believe it was the first one—was on the corporate concentration of vessels on the west coast. If I can just take a second, I can find that report. I believe it was on the regulation of west coast fisheries, tabled on February 28, 2019.I believe that was the one.
Then we had to come back and look at that, because we heard from the fisheries sector on the west coast that virtually nothing had been done. The department had assigned one person to try to determine who owned what in the quotas and licences on all of the west coast of B.C., an insurmountable task for one individual to be assigned to.
What they found was that the department does not know who owns what licence, who owns what quota or who has beneficial ownership of basically anything on the coast. This should have been a lesson for the department to respond to, and it should have been something that was addressed much earlier. I believe that to know what actions the department and the government actually have taken on that should be a comprehensive part of the review of the Fisheries Act. The regulations that are required to be adjusted, adopted and developed to do that will take a significant amount of time, and time has now passed—a number of years—since we did that first report in, I believe, 2019.
Then we restudied the issue in 2023, only to find that so little had been done that harvesters and others—the communities that depend on those harvesters—were feeling absolutely forgotten. That is not the role of this committee, nor should should it be the role of the government or the department. The well-being of Canadians, the communities they live in and the people who rely on them should be the responsibility of the members of this committee, as elected members, and of a department that they hinge their lives upon. They're not allowed to fish unless the department says they can fish. They can only fish when the department says they can fish. They can only fish under the regulations that the department develops. The department can only develop those regulations under what is permitted within the Fisheries Act.
There are so many pieces that have not been completed or completely answered for us, as elected representatives, to be able to do a comprehensive review of the act without having those questions answered.
The 2016 report, “Sustaining Canada's Major Fish Stocks—Fisheries and Oceans Canada”, was the one that I first quoted regarding the department's response to the commissioner saying that they would “develop a plan” to develop “Integrated Fisheries Management Plans”—integrated fisheries management plans that were committed to more than a decade earlier. This is a 2016 report from the commissioner.
Now, eight years later, going on nine years later, we still don't know if the department is able to develop those integrated fisheries management plans under the auspices of the Fisheries Act, an act that was revised in 2018, I believe it was, which should have provided all the tools for the department to get the job done. I would hope, and I believe, that the individuals working in that department really would have liked to get that job done.
