Fisheries Committee on Oct. 9th, 2024

[The Chair, Liberal, Ken McDonald]

I call this meeting to order.

Welcome to meeting number 121 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 want to make a few comments for the benefit of witnesses and members.

Please wait until I recognize you by name before speaking.

For those in the room, you can use the earpiece and select the desired channel.

Please address all comments through the chair.

Pursuant to Standing Order 108(2), and the motion adopted on Monday, September 16, 2024, the committee is resuming its study of the impact the reopening of the cod fishery on Newfoundland and Labrador and Quebec.

Welcome to our witnesses.

On Zoom, from FFAW-Unifor, we have Dwan Street, inshore member representative of area 3Ps and president-elect, and Dr. Erin Carruthers, senior fisheries scientist; and from the Institute for the Oceans and Fisheries, University of British Columbia, Dr. George Rose, honorary professor. Of course, in the room we have the Honourable Gerry Byrne, Minister of Fisheries, Forestry and Agriculture for the Government of Newfoundland and Labrador.

Thank you for taking the time to appear. You will each have five minutes or less for opening statements.

I believe the FFAW will deliver two sets of opening remarks, one from Ms. Street and one from Ms. Carruthers.

Ms. Street, you can go first, if you're ready, for five minutes or less.

[Dwan Street, Inshore Member Representative of Area 3Ps and President-Elect, Fish, Food and Allied Workers Union]

Mr. Chair, honourable members of the committee, thank you for the opportunity to address you today regarding the northern cod commercial fishery. I'm here today representing over 13,000 commercial fish harvesters and processing plant workers.

I thank the committee for highlighting the urgent nature of the northern cod decision and the fact that the June decision made by current Minister of Fisheries and Oceans Diane Lebouthillier threatens the continued rebuilding of our historic cod stock, as well as the continued economic sustainability of coastal Newfoundland and Labrador.

For over 500 years, northern cod has been the lifeblood of our coastal communities. Our union is deeply invested in the sustainable management and future viability of this critical resource. Since the moratorium in 1992, our members have worked tirelessly as stewards of this stock. Through collaborative science initiatives, a commitment to sustainable fishing practices and participation in the stewardship fishery, we have seen the spawning stock biomass grow from less than 10,000 tonnes to nearly 400,000 tonnes today. That's a remarkable, 40-fold increase. This growth has allowed the stock to move from the critical to the cautious zone in 2024.

While this is certainly positive news, we must not repeat the mistakes of the past. The decision to reopen the commercial fishery with a 6% allocation to offshore draggers is deeply concerning. It threatens to undermine decades of rebuilding efforts.

Let me be clear: FFAW-Unifor vehemently opposes any offshore trawling activity on this stock. Targeting dense pre-spawning and spawning aggregations during winter months poses an unacceptable risk to continued recovery. Our position on access and allocation, of course, remains unchanged. We stand firm in our conviction that the first 115,000 metric tons of northern cod must be exclusively allocated to the inshore sector and indigenous groups of our province. This is not merely our position but a long-standing commitment of the federal government, as evidenced in the briefing note provided to your honourable members.

This commitment dates to the late 1970s. It's been consistently upheld by successive governments. It recognizes the critical importance of the northern cod fishery to our coastal communities and the inshore fleet's reliance on this adjacent resource. The commitment also recognizes the crisis that resulted from the moratorium, the voices of inshore harvesters who were ignored in the years leading to the collapse and the hundreds of communities in our province that were left irreparably devastated by the consequences.

The inshore sector has demonstrated tremendous capacity to harvest northern cod. In 2023, our members landed 70% of the 12,999-tonne maximum allowable harvest in just four weeks. This was achieved while adhering to stringent conservation measures and weekly landing limits. From 2023 to 2024, the total allowable catch for northern cod increased by 6,000 tonnes, yet our inshore members received just 2,000 tonnes of this increase. These are the same harvesters who have acted as stewards of this resource for the last 32 years. Seeing the status of northern cod move from the critical to the cautious zone is a result of their hard work and dedication, but seeing a return to the dragger fishery is a slap in the face to our inshore harvesters and our plant workers and a symbol of great disconnect between the sitting government and the people of Newfoundland and Labrador.

Introducing new offshore capacity is unnecessary and harmful to the economic sustainability of our owner-operator fleet and to the land-based processing workers. This season, we harvested 75% of the inshore allocation in four weeks. Our harvesters have the capacity to land a significant volume of high-quality fish, providing frozen product year-round without targeting these vulnerable spawning aggregations.

We urge this committee to recognize the economic importance of this fishery. Owner-operator harvesters are genuinely stewards of the resource. They take the long-term sustainability of this fishery very seriously, having lived through the moratorium. They've invested heavily in sustainable gear and quality handling techniques and have participated in a fisheries improvement project that recently received an “A” rating from international NGOs.

As we look to the future, we call on government to take several critical actions.

First, immediately revert the management plan for 2J3KL northern cod to a stewardship fishery model and rescind the access of domestic and international offshore dragger fleets.

Second, uphold the 115,000 metric ton commitment for exclusive priority allocation to Newfoundland and Labrador inshore harvesters and indigenous groups until such time as the stock has sufficiently rebuilt.

Third, formalize a system of harvester participation and input into all aspects of fisheries management for northern cod.

In closing, I want to emphasize that the decisions made regarding northern cod and its management will have far-reaching implications for coastal Newfoundland and Labrador. Our communities, which have existed for centuries because of this fishery, are counting on responsible, sustainable management of this resource. The future of northern cod is inextricably linked to the future of our coastal communities.

We urge the committee to recommend management measures that recognize this reality and support the long-term sustainability of both the resource and the people who depend on it.

Also, Minister Lebouthillier's parallel decision to allocate the majority of the redfish unit 1 fishery to the corporate dragger fleet has left our community-based, Gulf of St. Lawrence inshore fleet struggling to survive. To add insult to injury, current management rules mean they cannot even access the small bit of quota they do have.

We therefore urge DFO to adjust the minimum fishing depth to align with the current location of the redfish stocks. This will allow our harvesters to access this very time-sensitive fishery.

We learned hard lessons from the 1992 collapse of northern cod. Now is the time to apply these lessons, prioritize the adjacent inshore fleet and ensure that the benefits of stock recovery flow to those who most depend on the resource. We cannot repeat the mistakes of the past. We cannot let the voices of fish harvesters be ignored all over again.

I thank you for your time.

[The Chair, Liberal, Ken McDonald]

Thank you. That was a bit over.

We'll try to make that up now with Dr. Carruthers.

You have five minutes or less.

[Dr. Erin Carruthers, Senior Fisheries Scientist, Fish, Food and Allied Workers Union]

Thank you for taking the time to hear from the Fish, Food and Allied Workers Union on this important issue.

As the fishery scientist with the FFAW, I will focus my remarks on lessons learned and lessons forgotten from the collapse of the northern cod fishery in the 1980s and 1990s, and we'll also comment on our concerns with how the federal government chose to end the cod moratorium.

What I'm going to do here is step through some of the research around the northern cod collapse and why it matters.

It's been over 30 years since the collapse of the northern cod fishery, yet the timing and explanations for the collapse remain contentious. When the northern cod assessment model was developed, it included extremely high natural mortality between 1992 and 1994, and subsequent variations of the northern cod assessment model, including the one used in the 2024 assessment, all attribute the collapse to an unknown natural mortality event.

Now, for those folks who are not at stock assessment meetings on the regular...at its most basic, a stock assessment model tracks recruitment, growth and death in a fish stock. There are only two ways to kill a fish in an assessment model. It's either attributed to fishing as fishing mortality, or it's everything else, which is that grab bag of a natural mortality. That includes unaccounted-for fishing mortality and discarding, as well as everything else. In the official DFO stock assessment version of an event, something unknown knocked out millions of fish in the early 1990s. The loss of capelin can explain some of that collapse, but not much.

However, the DFO stock assessment is not the only peer-reviewed and published account of the stock collapse. Academic research from the mid-1990s onwards showed sequential decline in fishery catch rates of inshore gillnet fisheries in the early 1980s, midshore and offshore gillnet fisheries in the late 1980s, and then from the Canadian trawler fleet in the late 1980s as well. Research papers from the mid-1990s showed that offshore catch rates declined first in the north and that these Canadian draggers were fishing on pre-spawning and spawning aggregations.

Multiple research papers on the collapse of northern cod showed that northern cod became increasingly concentrated, shifted south and were distributed deeper throughout the 1980s and 1990s. These changes contribute to, number one, increased vulnerabilities, particularly to offshore dragger fleets, and number two, to over-estimation of stock health.

The term “hyperstability” was coined by Dr. George Rose and Dave Kulka, and it was used to describe how fishing fleets can maintain high catch rates, even during stock collapse. This happened with northern cod. That particular paper has been cited over 400 times, and I say that metric to indicate that these issues are well known within the fishery science community.

More than 30 years later, there's still no agreement on how, why, when and importantly where northern cod collapsed. However, one of the lessons that we could have and should have learned was that changes in fish distribution matter.

Northern cod is a stock complex. This means that codfish are not evenly distributed throughout Newfoundland and Labrador waters. There are multiple distinct spawning areas, and most fish annually migrate between particular offshore spawning areas and inshore spawning areas. Updated information and research on these questions, on these linkages, is fundamental for rebuilding a sustainable fishery.

One of the reasons I object to the reopening of the trawler fishery is that there has been no recent work on cod distribution, recovery and vulnerability during the winter and pre-spawning and spawning periods. The most recent acoustic survey of spawning aggregations occurred in 2015. Which pre-spawning and spawning aggregations are recovering and which are not? We don't know.

I expect that recovery is not evenly distributed across historic spawning areas, and I expect that, in part, because the recovery of the fishery is uneven in the inshore, with much-improved catch rates from the inshore sentinel survey in the north in 2J and northern 3K, but no increase at all in southern 3L.

Historically, these different inshore fishing grounds were linked to particular offshore spawning areas. Is the recovery that we're seeing now reliant on one or two spawning areas? None of these questions was reviewed at stock assessments prior to the minister's decision.

Why did the minister reopen the northern cod fishery to Canadian and international bottom trawl fleets without doing due diligence and assessing stock distribution and vulnerability during the winter and spawning period? Due diligence and a lesson learned would have meant research and review of up-to-date acoustic tagging data and linkages between feeding and spawning areas. It would have meant identification, documentation and, importantly, conservation of spawning aggregations.

The motion also included—

[The Chair, Liberal, Ken McDonald]

I'm going to have to cut you off there, Dr. Carruthers. We've gone over time, and I want to give other people a chance to speak and get to questions.

We'll now go to Dr. Rose for five minutes or less.

[Dr. George Rose, Honorary Professor, Institute for the Oceans and Fisheries, University of British Columbia, As an Individual]

There are several aspects to the decision of the minister to reopen a commercial fishery in the northern cod stock with an increased quota and new entrants. I'm going to deal only with the scientific information on the stock and advance my opinion that the decision does not provide for precautionary management in sustainable fisheries and opposes the spirit, if not the letter, of the stock provisions of the Fisheries Act.

To go back a bit, the door was reopened for a commercial fishery in the fall of 2023, when DFO science conducted a new analysis of the productivity of the stock. This resulted in a revised stock recruitment relationship and a lowering of the critical limit reference point—the LRP, as I'll refer to it. They based this on age-0 recruitment, which is very unusual in fisheries science and hasn't really been tested. This LRP, then, is the dividing line between a stock being in critical condition, with its ability to sustain itself seriously impaired, and a cautious zone, where the stock is still below or, in the case of the northern cod, well below its historical abundance and productivity. It is also below any target biomass or upper limit where productivity is not considered to be impaired. That's still undefined by science for the northern cod.

It's very important to emphasize that, despite being moved into the cautious zone, the stock itself did not grow into the cautious zone. At least some of the press I read inferred this, but it's simply that the bar to jump over the line into the cautious zone was lowered.

It's also important to emphasize that the lowering of the LRP was substantial. It was considered that the stock needed at least a million tonnes of spawning biomass to remain productive, as it has historically. As recently as 2023, the LRP was considered by DFO's and other scientific analyses, including some done by me and my colleagues, to exceed 800,000 tonnes. The new LRP reduces it to somewhat above 300,000 tonnes.

This rewrites science history, which is a very important aspect. The lowering of the LRP suggests that the stock has been in the cautious zone since 2016, with production—meaning reproductive success recruitment—not seriously impaired. The evidence to date, however, indicates that recruitment has been well below historical averages for all of the seven or eight years since then. This provides very little evidence that the LRP is justified.

It's reasonable to think that if productivity were not seriously impaired, as it's supposed to be now, at least one or two years of historically average recruitment would have occurred in the past seven or eight years. However, it has not. While I applaud DFO science for its investigation and research, I will remain skeptical about this new lowered and unverified LRP until there's evidence that the stock can be as productive for fisheries, not age-0s, with such a low spawning biomass. I think it is too soon to use it to determine management. This is my opinion.

What about the stock itself? Since 2016, when, according to the LRP, the stock was out of the critical zone, the impacts of a lack of strong recruitment, fishing removals and unspecified natural mortality—which Dr. Carruthers referred to—have all led the stock to have zero net productivity, with a negative or flatlined biomass in some years, and with no improvement in sight according to the latest stock assessment. My assumption when approaching this is that a management objective is stock growth. It's axiomatic that stock growth requires positive net productivity. As it stands, the current stock assessment indicates that the stock is in a very weak position for growth, even with no fishing. Projections suggest further decline.

It seems clear that the assumed management objective has not been met on stock growth. To be fair, stock growth is dependent on several factors in the environment that are now not favourable, especially the lack of capelin, the main food of the northern cod. Management does control fishing removals, though, and up until this year and this recent decision it has done an admirable job of keeping those removals low enough so as not to result in stock decline, even when environmental conditions were poor.

Maybe that's the best we can do right now, but we're not doing our best. The current decision to increase the quota considerably, by nearly 50%, and to impose two new entrants in the offshore increases the likelihood of stock decline, even to the extent of collapsing the spawning biomass back below the new LRP. From the DFO latest assessment, the probability of doing this is worryingly high, at 42% with no fishery and 52% with a doubled harvest. According to the fish stocks provisions in the Fisheries Act—

[The Chair, Liberal, Ken McDonald]

Dr. Rose, I have to cut you off there. You've gone over by more than a minute, and I want to get to the last speaker before we run out of time.

[Dr. George Rose]

All right.

[The Chair, Liberal, Ken McDonald]

We'll now go to Minister Byrne for five minutes or less, please.

[Gerry Byrne, Minister, Fisheries, Forestry and Agriculture, Government of Newfoundland and Labrador]

Thank you, Mr. Chair and distinguished members.

I would like to acknowledge, with appreciation, my co-panellists appearing today as witnesses.

It is a sincere pleasure for me to return to this table. This time, however, it will be at the other end of the committee room. As some of you may know, I had the privilege of serving on the House of Commons Standing Committee on Fisheries and Oceans for several years, and I believe we did important work back then, as you continue to do now.

I have been witness to every aspect of the rise and fall of our northern cod resource as well as the pain and suffering surrounding its slow and difficult rebuilding.

In 1994, as a much younger man, I was asked to serve as the special adviser to the then-minister of fisheries and oceans. This was just after the two-year moratorium had been already declared by then-minister John Crosbie in 1992.

In 1994, the two-year moratorium became a moratorium of indefinite duration.

In 1996, I was honoured to be asked to serve in public life as the member of Parliament for Humber—St. Barbe—Baie Verte. I served in the House for just shy of 20 years, including in the cabinet of Mr. Chrétien.

In 2015, for some of the very reasons we sit together today at this table, I took a decision to seek office in the provincial legislature, where I currently serve as Minister of Fisheries.

Prior to my parliamentary career, I worked briefly in marine ecosystem research in northern Newfoundland, having trained at Dalhousie University.

My perspectives on the past and ongoing failures of northern cod management are both professional and personal. In these difficult times, the one thing I believe we, the people of Newfoundland and Labrador, need to be able to rely on is that this committee will serve the interests of a better fishery and a better future for those who have been waiting in hope for its return. Now is not the time for partisan loyalties or entrenchments.

In my time here, if there was one committee on Parliament Hill that rightfully cultivated the reputation of being beyond politics and in service to our coastal communities, it is, indeed, this committee. I can't ever remember any member of this committee looking to join so they could be a shill for their party, nor can I remember dissenting minority reports being the norm, as it is with other committees. This committee always came together to speak truth to power. Keep hold of that.

With that said, it was disturbing to have learned through internal DFO documents that the 32-year moratorium was somehow over by virtue of a switch of a single word and in defiance of scientific advice. The legal and political consequences of relying on a single word—commercial over sentinel—to generate a false hope are offensive. Talking points don't change 32 years of loss, the anxiety of cultural separation or the economic and social upheaval that this brings forth. It doesn't change the past, but, unfortunately, that single word, as we have discovered, does have a material effect on our future.

For anybody to think that the decisions around the 2024 harvesting plan, or CHP, for northern cod would result in street parades or songs and poems being written in celebration of the weight of the past 32 years being somehow lifted exposes the fact that the magnitude of this decision was never understood by DFO. It wasn't understood in 1992 and clearly still isn't understood to this day. There was no political win deserving to anyone here.

The only political win that can ever be created is from a fishery that has been honestly rebuilt on a foundation of sustainability, with windows and doors to allow transparency and a protective roof made up of informed decision-making, with fishermen and scientists working together towards an informed joint decision-making process. This is the kind of house we need to build to have a future. This was, and is, too much for Newfoundland and Labrador to ask, apparently.

I don't know exactly what to say to that, but over the next 90 minutes, if you were to ask me what I knew about the long-standing Government of Canada allocation policy of the first 115,000 metric tons of harvestable quota, I would tell you.

If you were to ask me what has been the long-standing position of the Government of Newfoundland and Labrador on the inshore-offshore allocation split, I would tell you.

If you were to ask me what I think of the supposed necessity of Canada's having no choice but to recognize the fishery as being commercial, with all of its legal implications within NAFO, I would tell you why this was untrue and defeatist.

If you ask me what I feel about the risks of foreign distant-water fishing fleets, foreign bottoms, entering the fishery under the current NAFO convention and its system of voluntary rule, I will tell you what I think there.

If you ask me if there are other Atlantic fisheries that demonstrate just or even more clearly how far off track DFO is from understanding the past and learning from it to make better conservation decisions in the future, I will point directly to what is happening today with redfish in unit 1, Gulf of St. Lawrence.

Most importantly, if you ask me how all of this was able to occur in such a vacuum here in Ottawa, with no one offering honest, pragmatic advice to the emperor about the clothes they think they are fashioning, I will tell you. It's time now to speak truth to power. I will explain why joint management's time has come.

Mr. Chair, I look forward to the questions to come forward.

[The Chair, Liberal, Ken McDonald]

Thank you for that. We'll now begin our rounds of questions.

I remind members to please identify to whom you're asking the question, because we have members on Zoom and somebody in the room.

I'll go to Mr. Small first, for six minutes or less.

[Clifford Small, Conservative, Coast of Bays—Central—Notre Dame, NL]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

I thank the witnesses for showing up at this very important study.

Mr. Chair, my first question here is for Mr. Rose, who is the pre-eminent expert on northern cod biology, for sure.

Mr. Rose, you made mention of the lowering of the lower reference point back in October of last year. Do you think that was a part of what a lot of people are calling a political decision? Do you think that was a part of the political equation for reopening the commercial northern cod fishery?

[Dr. George Rose]

I can't really speak to that other than to hope certainly not. I think it was a result of investigative science that was perhaps pushed a little too hard into the management regime. I won't question the ethics of my scientific colleagues on that.

[Clifford Small, Conservative, Coast of Bays—Central—Notre Dame, NL]

We had officials here at this committee a couple of days ago who told us that data going back to 1954 had been pulled in to change the reference point on that cod stock. In that same meeting, these officials talked about how important the logbook data was that was coming back from fishermen in the northern cod stewardship fishery. However, an Order Paper question that I submitted last October that came back in December revealed that the logbook data from 2020, 2021 and 2022 was still on the shelf.

Does the fact that that logbook data had been sitting there for three years indicate that the data was valuable to DFO?

Thank you.

[Dr. George Rose]

There are several issues with the new stock assessment and the lowering of the LRP that I'm aware of. That may be one, but there are others.

I have had an opportunity now to read the stock status report, which just came out days ago, to see some of the details of how they arrived at these new calculations. I remain, as I say, skeptical about them and about how this was put together.

I think the general statement here that needs to be thought about really clearly is that this new modelling approach and the lowering of the LRP rewrites the scientific history of this stock going back 50 years. It goes back to some of the most well-known Newfoundland fishery scientists, right back to Wilfred Templeman, and their analyses and opinions and data on this stock. It rewrites most of that, as does the current assessment model.

My view of this right now is not to dismiss the new model or say that I know absolutely that it's incorrect, but I'm skeptical about such a rapid rewriting of scientific history on this stock. It seems to be unquestioned that here we are; we have a brand new world, and we're supposed to accept this. Science doesn't work that way. Science remains skeptical until there is convincing evidence that the new—

[Clifford Small, Conservative, Coast of Bays—Central—Notre Dame, NL]

Thank you, Mr. Rose. My time here is limited.

[Dr. George Rose]

I'm sorry.

[Clifford Small, Conservative, Coast of Bays—Central—Notre Dame, NL]

My question was about bringing data from 1954 into this equation when data that was only three or four years old was sitting on the shelf and not made a part of the equation. Does that make sense to you, Mr. Rose?

[Dr. George Rose]

Well, no, just stated like that, it doesn't, but I don't know the details of that data, so I can't really say with any certainty.

[Clifford Small, Conservative, Coast of Bays—Central—Notre Dame, NL]

It's fish harvesters' logbook data, Mr. Rose, that shows catch rates about 50 times higher per unit per hour than they were in the eighties, at least.

You've had extensive experience at the NAFO table, I understand. Is that correct?

[Dr. George Rose]

No, it's not.

[Clifford Small, Conservative, Coast of Bays—Central—Notre Dame, NL]

Okay. I was misled. I'm sorry.

I know you're very aware of NAFO. In your experience with NAFO, Mr. Rose, do you think that Canada was facing pressure to change this fishery from a stewardship fishery to a commercial fishery? Do you think there was undue pressure from NAFO to do so?

[Dr. George Rose]

No, not that I'm aware of.

[Clifford Small, Conservative, Coast of Bays—Central—Notre Dame, NL]

Thank you.

What would you like to see changed—

[The Chair, Liberal, Ken McDonald]

I'm going to have to cut you off there, Mr. Small. You have nine seconds left, so you won't get a question or an answer.