Fisheries Committee on Nov. 4th, 2024

[Todd Russell]

I think I gave a very brief background. Our people live primarily on the coast. Fishing the marine environment or access to the marine environment is huge for our people, our culture and our future. It has been in the past. We have been fighting for decades for fair and equitable access to the resources off our coast so that we can build our communities and certainly have good livelihoods and people can stay in their communities. Like most places, it's to have that sense of comfort and security, always keeping in mind, of course, that the resource itself is what is paramount in terms of its health, because if we don't have the resource, we don't have anything.

We made representations to the government that basically, given the science, given the management practices, we indicated that a 20,000 tonne TAC would be reasonable. We also put in, obviously, our position vis-à-vis how that should be allocated.

When it came in at about 18,000, certainly we felt that, given what our fishers are seeing on the water and their experience with fishing the resource over the last number of years under the stewardship fishery and now under the commercial fishery, this was a very sensible decision, but one that gave priority to our people and to our coast. That was so important.

We've had hundreds of people involved in the cod fishery this year. Household incomes have risen because of the cod fishery this year. Economic activity in our community has increased dramatically. We've also had more people involved on the processing side. It's been very helpful and very necessary.

[Bobby Morrissey, Liberal, Egmont, PE]

Thank you, Mr. Russell, for the detail.

In the time left, I want to go back to Ms. Rowe.

Ms. Rowe, you said that the FRCC was disbanded in 2011. Could you outline to the committee why and what the shortcomings are that you have observed since 2011? Did I interpret that correctly?

[Dr. Sherrylynn Rowe]

Yes, that's my understanding. I am not familiar with the rationale at the time for disbanding the FRCC, but that was one of the lessons.

[Bobby Morrissey, Liberal, Egmont, PE]

Since the FRCC has been disbanded, what impact have you experienced as it relates to the management of this fishery?

[Dr. Sherrylynn Rowe]

It doesn't necessarily have to relate specifically to the disbandment of the FRCC, but shortly after the cod collapse, there was a lot more engagement. Given what had occurred, there was a lot more engagement between the industry and scientists to try to do things better, more collaborative research on cod and more discussion around management decisions.

Over the last decade or so, we really seem to have lost some of that. Yes, there's still participation by these groups in the science advisory meetings. We have industry advisory meetings and whatnot, but I think there's room for a lot more dialogue to help solve some of these challenges that exist.

[Bobby Morrissey, Liberal, Egmont, PE]

Thank you.

Thank you, Chair.

[The Chair, Liberal, Ken McDonald]

Thank you, Mr. Morrissey.

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 want to welcome the witnesses and thank them for joining us. We're happy to hear from them. Their comments are quite insightful.

In Quebec, we're still concerned about the Gulf of St. Lawrence cod. This fish doesn't have the same DNA as northern cod, but bears a close resemblance to it.

Ms. Rowe, do St. Lawrence cod and northern cod have similar traits?

[Dr. Sherrylynn Rowe]

Broadly speaking, yes, it's the same species, so it would share many similar features with cod, like the way in which they reproduce, as an example. It is obviously recognized as a separate stock with differing life history traits, like how fast they grow, when they mature and so on. They're similar, but somewhat different.

One thing is that there has been some mixing in the past. We know that northern cod, for instance, from time to time, do in fact travel and intermingle to an extent with fish in the northern part of the gulf. They're separate, different, with some interchange from time to time.

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

Thank you. Your comments are enlightening.

In our area, people fish for both species of cod. My father used to fish for cod, and he could tell the difference between cod and black cod. In those days, a long time ago, both species were caught in the St. Lawrence River.

I would now like to talk about DFO's transparency. In your opinion, is changing the threshold—meaning the limit reference point for the stock to move from the critical zone to the cautious zone—a transparent way to show the reality?

Aren't we making data talk to drive decisions, instead of making decisions based on data?

[Dr. Sherrylynn Rowe]

Thank you for your question.

The decision to move cod from the critical zone to the cautious zone was a result of a framework process held by DFO in October of 2023. It was a science advisory process and peer-reviewed. There was a lot of discussion around the information that was there. Of course, the assessment model is a wonderful model that makes use of all kinds of data from different sources.

There are still questions that remain, however, on the extent to which this model is really capturing cod population dynamics. I mentioned a little bit about how it partitions mortality between natural mortality—cod dying from natural causes, from disease and parasites and so on—and fishing mortality. There's been some question about how well the model is tackling this key issue. It's really important, because while the survey can give us a good idea of how well cod are surviving from one year to the next, we have to estimate the relative impact of these two factors, fishing versus natural mortality, from the model using the data and some key assumptions around the data.

That right now involves ideas about catch bounds, the extent to which the reported landings may in fact represent the true landings and how that's varied over time. There are also some key assumptions in there about tagging information and I guess the likelihood of harvesters to report those details back to DFO.

Yes, I think there are questions that require further examination. Hopefully, that will happen over the months and years to come. The decision to change the reference point did stem from a science advisory meeting.

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

Thank you.

Mr. Best, you're an entrepreneur. You have your finger on the pulse of the people on the ground.

In your opinion, will the reopening of the offshore northern cod fishery bring cod biomass or stocks back into the critical zone?

[Glen Best]

Thank you. That's a good question.

When you say offshore, you're talking about, I would assume, mostly bottom trawling and the bigger offshore vessels. In the past, we've seen what has happened with the concentration of these large vessels that can fish at any time of the year, in any type of weather, through ice and all kinds of conditions. That's why I asked in my opening remarks whether we're doomed to repeat the mistakes of the past.

Somewhere along the way, there has to be room for offshore, I'm sure, but with a commitment of 115,000 tonnes before we even entertain that kind of fishing, we could be putting ourselves backwards really quickly and go back into a critical zone and do damage that we really don't want to do. That's why I asked whether we're doomed to repeat the mistakes of the past. Right now, I don't think we're at a position....

I mean, I'm comfortable with the 18,000-tonne quota from what I see on the water, but I don't think we're at a position right now where we should be introducing large vessels and bottom trawling back into the industry.

Thank you.

[The Chair, Liberal, Ken McDonald]

Thank you, Madame Desbiens.

We'll now go to Ms. Barron for six minutes or less, please.

[Lisa Marie Barron, NDP, Nanaimo—Ladysmith, BC]

Thank you, Chair.

Welcome to all of our witnesses today.

For my first question, perhaps it would be best to start with you, Mr. Best, just following the responses you're providing.

I recognize that this is a complex issue and I don't wish to oversimplify, but I'm curious to know if you could say what the one main learning is that you feel is most important for us to take into account as we move forward in this study from the mistakes of the past. What would that one main thing be, or do you have one main thing?

[Glen Best]

There are a lot of comments I could make on that.

I was 22 when the moratorium was called. One of the things I'll always remember is that fish harvesters on the water were telling people that the cod was in trouble. They said that people—this includes the science, the managers, DFO—didn't listen.

All of a sudden, in 1992, John Crosbie made that announcement down in Bay Bulls—when everybody was going to beat down the door in St. John's—that the cod was in trouble and that we'd lost the cod. You know, sometimes the people on the water can say it best. They know what's happening.

Now we're saying that the cod is growing. We feel that the cod stock has come back. I mean, in 3K, like all of Newfoundland, we've relied on shellfish. Shellfish are what paid the bills, what grew businesses and what kept communities going, and we see in 3K that shellfish is on the decline. I think that's directly a predator-prey relationship.

The lesson we need is that we have to remember where we came from with this northern cod. We have to be careful with where we're going, because if shellfish is in decline.... I firmly believe that we can't manage and design the ecosystem to what we want. The ecosystem is going to do what it's going to do. Sometimes we don't have much control over that. We have some control, so we had better be careful how we manage the stock, because this is what we'll have to rely on in the future.

[Lisa Marie Barron, NDP, Nanaimo—Ladysmith, BC]

Thank you, Mr. Best. That's lots of really good information that you've just shared.

Dr. Rowe, could I please bring the same question to you around what you think the main learnings—or learning—and the mistakes of the past are?

[Dr. Sherrylynn Rowe]

In terms of lessons learned, I really think that one of the key things we learned during the collapse would be the need for greater dialogue and collaboration between science and the industry. We made some really good progress with that during the 1990s. While it hasn't disappeared by any stretch of the imagination, it does feel like it has become reduced, maybe, over the last decade or so. I'd really like to see more discussion.

In terms of some of the questions we have right now, like those on the cod stock status and whether it is being rebuilt, whether there is more work that needs to be done and whether we should be doing what we're doing, that's where the FRCC was really so instrumental. It created a forum for the different stakeholders to discuss these important issues and to make recommendations on sensible paths forward.

At this point in time, I think we could really stand to see a lot more of that type of approach.

[Lisa Marie Barron, NDP, Nanaimo—Ladysmith, BC]

Thank you very much.

Dr. Rowe, you mentioned briefly in your opening statement the risks associated with fishing on winter spawning aggregations. You're not the first person who has brought this up. Can you tell us a bit more about the concern regarding having large offshore factory trawlers fishing specifically on winter spawning aggregations?

[Dr. Sherrylynn Rowe]

Sure.

Cod are extremely aggregated into dense shoals during the winter period. Some of this is related to pre-spawning and some actually to spawning. While in the past cod spawning behaviour was often assumed to be this behaviourally vacuous process of just random mating within large groups, we now know that it actually involves a lot of complex behaviour. There are aggressive interactions among males, which allow the most dominant ones to establish territories from which they court females using a combination of exaggerated fin displays and short grunting sounds.

Basically, the thought is that by fishing on these aggregations you can disrupt these types of behaviours, with potentially negative impacts on spawning success. On that basis, there's a lot of merit to trying to avoid fishing cod during the spawning season. The management plan, it sounds like, does include some provision for a spawning closure, but unfortunately we have really inadequate information about precisely where and when cod spawn to know for sure whether or not that's going to be adequate.

[Lisa Marie Barron, NDP, Nanaimo—Ladysmith, BC]

Thank you, Dr. Rowe.

I only have about 30 seconds left.

I was wondering, Mr. Best, if you could share more of your thoughts around fishing cod. You mentioned that there needs to be fair access to public resources. I'm wondering if you can share a little more of your thoughts around the importance of that public resource being used to the benefit of local communities.

[Glen Best]

Yes. Thank you.

Fair access is paramount. It is a public resource, and it is managed as such. I'm all for fair access, but fair access and the management of a resource have to be based.... There are a lot of variables—adjacency, historical attachment, viability of current enterprises—and I think those are the key factors. To manage a resource, access is always going to be a political hotbed. There are always groups looking for fish.

However, I think we have to look at the whole picture and ask this: What road do we go down to give that access to different groups?

[The Chair, Liberal, Ken McDonald]

Thank you, Ms. Barron.

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

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

Thank you, Mr. Chair

Thank you to all three witnesses for appearing today. I'd like to start with Mr. Best, if I could.

You're from the Fogo Island area, I believe. The committee was fortunate enough to travel up there a number of years ago, studying the North Atlantic cod situation. I recall hearing from the Fogo Island co-op about how it had changed its method of harvest and so on, so that it was providing a higher-quality retail or wholesale product and getting much more value per pound of impact on the fishery through that process.

Can you possibly provide a bit of testimony on the value through the longline process provided versus the value of fish caught through other processes?

[Glen Best]

Yes. Thank you.

You mentioned the Fogo Island co-op. We're the largest fisheries co-op in Canada, I think, and we've been around for 57 years. We're pretty proud of that.

When it comes to quality, with the help of the AFF, the Atlantic fisheries fund, it has invested millions into longline technology. In my opinion it's a fantastic way to fish. There's very little bycatch. There's very little bottom destruction or habitat destruction. It's just hooks that are out on the bottom, and the fish come and take the hooks. The co-op buys that fish.

We just finished fishing in October. The problem is that there's not enough quota late enough into the year because a lot of the fish come in earlier in gillnets. That's a challenge. When the fish are full of capelin, the water temperature is at its highest. There are a lot of challenges in catching fish at that time of year, and I understand that's the time of year small boats need to catch fish. There's a balance between how much fish you catch in the summer and how much you can catch in the fall when the quality is probably better.

I'll just say that, with the longline product, the co-op was buying that fish and getting that product to a customer who pays more for the fish. Therefore, you can get a better product and a better return.