Evidence of meeting #122 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 stock.
A recording is available from Parliament.
Conservative
Mel Arnold Conservative North Okanagan—Shuswap, BC
Okay. How many seals would there be in the northern cod ecosystem area?
Doctor of Marine Ecology, Fisheries and Marine Mammal Specialist, M-Expertise Marine Inc., As an Individual
Again, it depends on the species. We have more than 600,000 grey seals, and the harp seal population is in the millions. The populations are exploding right now.
Conservative
Mel Arnold Conservative North Okanagan—Shuswap, BC
Could you give me a quick estimate as to how many tonnes of fish those seal populations could be consuming annually right now?
Doctor of Marine Ecology, Fisheries and Marine Mammal Specialist, M-Expertise Marine Inc., As an Individual
I haven't done the math, but it's a lot of fish.
The seals can adapt; they are generalists. When there's no more of one type of fish, like cod, their population will not decrease due to a lack of food. They will just switch to something else and continue eating. They are competing with cod as a predator in the ecosystem as well. Cod, when it was abundant, was quite a big fish that was competing for the same kinds of food resources that seals were.
There are a lot of questions. We're trying to figure out the role of seals in the ecosystem and their part—
Conservative
Mel Arnold Conservative North Okanagan—Shuswap, BC
Thank you.
Would you be able to provide the committee, in writing, with the information that I just requested on the number of seals and how many tonnes of fish they may be consuming in the northern cod ecosystem?
Doctor of Marine Ecology, Fisheries and Marine Mammal Specialist, M-Expertise Marine Inc., As an Individual
Yes, definitely.
Conservative
Mel Arnold Conservative North Okanagan—Shuswap, BC
When you say that they're basically opportunistic feeders, they would, then, if there were insufficient numbers of cod, tend to feed on, perhaps, the capelin or other smaller fish that cod may prey on. Would that be a correct statement?
Doctor of Marine Ecology, Fisheries and Marine Mammal Specialist, M-Expertise Marine Inc., As an Individual
Yes. It would have a double impact, because they would eat the prey that would be available to cod as well.
Conservative
Mel Arnold Conservative North Okanagan—Shuswap, BC
Thank you.
It's very interesting. As I mentioned to our last witnesses, we tend to hear at this committee how everyone is competing for the last few fish but not really looking at why there are only a few fish left. That's what I'm hoping to get at with this line of questioning.
Mr. Vardy, you mentioned that you feel the LRP, or the limit reference point, was changed without transparent consultation. Could you elaborate a little further on that?
Economist, As an Individual
Historically, with the northern cod, of course, it was in the sixties and seventies when there was a massive onslaught of foreign fishing on those stocks. Prior to that, the spawning biomass was on the order of 1 million to 1.2 million metric tons. Then, of course, we had this decline that took place and you had the extension of jurisdictions in 1977, and Canada started to build up its fishing effort. We started to build fish plants around the province. We created an enormous capacity. We built up more capacity, different kinds of gear, a lot of pressure on the resource—
Conservative
Mel Arnold Conservative North Okanagan—Shuswap, BC
I'm sorry, but my time is running out very quickly here.
You mentioned that the LRP was changed without transparent consultation. Would you elaborate specifically on that?
Economist, As an Individual
My understanding is that, in 2023, there were consultations held by DFO, and people were invited to come and participate in the new model. The LRP emerged from the new model of 2023.
My understanding is that the scientific.... Peer review is an important process in science and in the management of fisheries. It means that all the authorities.... You need to have peer-reviewed publications. You have science. That's how science works in today's world. You have to have not just the people who are invited by DFO to come and review the documents, but the people who come because they're interested and want to have access to the models, be able to simulate the models and just see how the models comport with the previous data.
We had so many royal commissions and reports, like the Harris report and the various reports that made conclusions about the fishery. It would appear, based on the new model, that many of those reports have gone out the window and that we had not a clue in the nineties what was happening to the resource. You have a lot of distinguished scientists who got their names certified and written on documents and publications, and now we're being told they were wrong.
It's a big event in Newfoundland and Labrador because it's a dispute over whether this fundamental resource is sustainable or not sustainable, and whether we've been doing a good job. What you have here is that the science people used—the science that Michael Kirby used in recommending that we harvest up to 400,000 tonnes and the science that Les Harris used in 1990 to say we should be reducing the quota down below 100,000 tonnes—is all flawed because now we have new information going back to the fifties.
I'm not saying it's wrong. I'm not a scientist. I have no right to make any statement like that, but I think there needs to be a more open, public forum where people can come—and not just by invitation only. There needs to be a better process. My sense of this is there's a lot of—
Liberal
The Chair Liberal Ken McDonald
Thank you, Mr. Vardy. I have to cut you off there. We've gone two minutes over the time, actually.
We'll move on to Mr. Kelloway now as we finish up this portion.
Liberal
Mike Kelloway Liberal Cape Breton—Canso, NS
Thank you, Mr. Chair.
Actually, that's a really good segue. I wanted to say thank you to the witnesses today for their testimony.
Mr. Vardy, thank you for your service to Newfoundland and Labrador and Canada through the various roles you've had.
You talked about a shared model of management. Can you unpack that a bit? One of the benefits of having a committee and having experts come in is that we have a certain amount of time, but we don't have a lot of time to unpack terminology.
You mentioned a shared management approach to the fishery and you cited Iceland and Norway. I wonder if you can break down some of your thoughts about the governance and how that may work, but in a very short period of time. It's very similar to a game show. We have only a certain amount of time until the buzzer goes off.
Could you provide us a bit of your experience on what that shared model would look like?
Also, thank you for your recommendations today. They were very much appreciated.
Economist, As an Individual
Thank you for the question.
Norway and Iceland are both unitary states. They don't have federal jurisdiction the way we do in Canada and the United States. When you look at Australia and the United States, you see quite a different approach to fisheries management, because they're federal states. In the United States, you have a very comprehensive system of joint management that involves the states but is not one-on-one, because there are 50 states in the U.S. We have 13 subnational jurisdictions in Canada, or 10 provinces—however you want to look at it—but in the U.S. they have this regional approach. The regional approach brings the states together. In Canada, however, property and civil rights are in the jurisdiction of the provincial governments.
When I was the deputy minister of fisheries, the Government of Newfoundland and Labrador had jurisdiction over fish plant licensing and major capital investments in that sector. The federal government had major jurisdiction over the harvesting sector and to a large extent over marketing and quality control. There was an overlap on quality between the federal and provincial governments. What we didn't have was a mechanism to bring this together formally under the law. You had people in the industry being regulated and getting one set of regulations....
If you're a vertically integrated fishing company, you have to deal with a lot of different regulatory regimes. We need one integrated regulatory regime. That's what we did with the offshore. The Atlantic accord created the Canada-Newfoundland and Labrador Offshore Petroleum Board, which brought together those regimes and created transparency. That's essentially, in my opinion, what we need to do here.
Iceland and Norway have been very successful in what they've done in managing their stocks. They never let their cod stocks get to the point that ours did. We made a major failure. A lot of that failure was the lack of coordination between governments. Governments were giving conflicting signals. The provincial government was encouraging more fish plants to be built, and the federal government was saying, no, you have enough. It depended on which minister was in power. You had some ministers who were pro-development and other ministers who were pro-regulation or pro-conservation.
I think it's about time for us to really focus on how we do the management. I think the instability of our industry is to a large extent attributable to the way we have managed it, particularly the politics of it. We should be world leaders in the fishery. We have enormous resources if we can rebuild those resources. We talk about megaprojects in Canada. The fishery is a megaproject—a potential megaproject.
Economist, As an Individual
If you look at the amount of fish we used to produce compared with what we're producing today with failed management, the potential output and the value added for that industry is enormous. It's a big economic development opportunity we're missing out on in Canada. We're failing. We should be coming up abreast of the other countries.
The key question that we need to ask and that this committee needs to ask is this: What does it take? What resources are needed? What structure is needed to bring forward that more modern industry, which creates a lot more value than what we have today?
Liberal
Liberal
Mike Kelloway Liberal Cape Breton—Canso, NS
I'll use those 40 seconds and stay with Mr. Vardy. I have the time, Chair, so I'll use it.
With the last set of witnesses, we talked about trawling and how different it is from the seventies, eighties and nineties. Given your experience, and having been at the forefront of the fishery, is there a difference between trawling in the seventies, eighties and nineties—the nineties in particular, when you were there—and now in terms of conservation and protection, or is it grey or nuanced there?
Economist, As an Individual
I think we have to look at this in terms of the mortality of fish. At the end of the day, it comes down to the mortality and how much mortality there is. Technology can be a great friend, but it can also be a big enemy. We have become so good at fishing. With auto-trawling or whatever the technology it is, we've become extremely good. We can overcome nature. We can overwhelm nature. We really need to fish better than we used to fish.
Is auto-trawling today more benign than auto-trawling many years ago? The reality is that, if you're fishing spawning concentrations, the fish don't have a chance. They do not have a chance. Dr. Harris had some really good analogies. What happens is that the fish congregate. They congregate when they're spawning. They congregate to spawn. They have a big feeding period with capelin, and then they go. When they spawn, they congregate. They're very vulnerable. The auto-trawl catch per unit of effort can continue to be level. You can be fishing and then suddenly it drops off. That's the kind of thing that happens in the fishery.
When I was the deputy minister of fisheries, I remember the day I got a call from the largest fish company. He said they were closing down the plant at Port Union the next week, because the trawlers were coming in without any catch—nothing. There was nothing in the trawl. We had reached the point where everything was great until it wasn't. It wasn't just a nice tapering. It was an abrupt fall, because the technology was so good.
We shouldn't be fishing spawning concentrations. It's not fair. It's like shooting moose from a helicopter.
Liberal
The Chair Liberal Ken McDonald
I think shooting moose from a helicopter would be somewhat conspicuous as well.
Anyway, thanks to our witnesses. We have to go in camera now to do some committee business, but I want to say thank you to Ms. Morissette and Mr. Vardy, of course, for sharing their knowledge with the committee today as we go through this particular study.
We'll suspend for a moment now to switch to in camera. Our witnesses can sign off, exit or whatever, and we'll get into some committee business.
[Proceedings continue in camera]