Fisheries Committee on Nov. 4th, 2024

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

Thank you.

Would there be an impact on marine certification with recognition of the longlining versus the bottom-trawling product? In the long run, do you expect there could be any impacts on marine certification?

[Glen Best]

When you talk about the certification, I guess you mean groups like MSC, the Marine Stewardship Council.

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

Yes.

[Glen Best]

I'm not the best person to ask on that because I don't know the process. They do audits, and there's a process where a fishery has to meet certain requirements to get certification. I would suspect that maybe longline would be more favourable. I don't know how they would view it, but I would suspect it would be. When you're talking about bottom trawling, the trawler doesn't discriminate what goes in there. There's no grid. There's no sorting like there is with shrimp. I would think there could be implications in terms of the certification for the cod when you're using different gear types.

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

Thank you.

The way I understand it, the fishing areas have been split or divided differently. Can you provide your input on how that is impacting either fishery—the inshore or the offshore?

[Glen Best]

Historically, cod was managed under 2J3KL. That's right from Labrador to 3L and south. The way it was managed up until a couple of years ago, there was a set TAC and weekly limits, and everybody fished under the same thing.

As of late, 2J has been assigned a different portion. They get 20% for the same vessel class that I fish, and all others in 3KL, but their trip limits are greater. As I say, for the fall fishery, they get a biweekly limit of 120,000, I believe, and I get a biweekly of 42,500. There's a lot of friction in the industry regarding how that management scheme is set up.

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

Okay.

Were you consulted on how that division would take place, or was anybody consulted on that change in the division and TAC?

[Glen Best]

I wasn't privy because I wasn't part of those processes. I'm your individualist. I represent myself as an individual harvester. Through the FFAW and the Atlantic Groundfish Council, I guess that was discussed—and then, of course, through the DFO—and those decisions were made.

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

Thank you.

I think my time's up.

[The Chair, Liberal, Ken McDonald]

Thank you, Mr. Arnold.

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

[Mike Kelloway, Liberal, Cape Breton—Canso, NS]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Thanks to the witnesses, Mr. Best, Dr. Rowe and Mr. Russell. We've had some really good testimony here today with respect to northern cod.

I'm going to start with Mr. Russell.

There are a couple of things that really hit home to me about your opening remarks.

First, there were some key words, “equitable fisheries management”, and you talked about the optimism and hope that it's brought to communities. I think it's really important to highlight that. I like the words “equitable fisheries management” because when we look at the quota for this year, we see that it's 84% inshore; 10% indigenous, Innu and Inuit; and 6% offshore. You talked about the optimism and hope. I want to drill down a little deeper, though, to what it's like when you're not involved in a fishery or when you're not involved in a significant way. For the folks around this table and the folks who are watching, I think it's really important to get a sense from you, and from the people you serve, of what that feels like. That's number one.

Number two is that during testimony it was referenced that northern cod in Newfoundland and Labrador will be processed in Nova Scotia. I'm wondering if you can give us any feedback as to processing plants in Newfoundland and Labrador. Have they extended, or will they be extending, hours of operations to accommodate processing inshore or offshore?

Thank you.

[Todd Russell]

Yes, the cod fishery is hugely important for my people and the communities. When the moratorium came on in 1992, like for many communities in this province—and maybe even more so in Labrador—there was a huge shock. It really struck our communities in such a visceral way because cod was really almost the entire fishery that we had on the coast of Labrador. You know, we had for some time then been involved in a small crab fishery that was being built and prosecuted on the coast of Labrador, and there were signs of things happening with the inshore shrimp.

You know, when the cod moratorium came on, it was almost like total devastation because our people really had no other fisheries to turn to. I mentioned that in my remarks. The cod has always formed almost a crucial foundational relationship with our people, both from a sustenance and cultural perspective and, of course, from a commercial perspective. When the stewardship fishery was introduced a few years ago and our people participated, you know, the energy started to come back into our communities because, of course, we started to experience declines as well, as I said, in those shellfish resources. The cod was rising up while those other resources were lessening. Of course, many people talk about the relationship between groundfish and shellfish and about whether the increase in groundfish will have an impact on shellfish and their production, so it was huge.

Like I said, in the communities, we have more people now involved in the fishery from a harvesting perspective. It's almost the first time that we can recall in our history that our people have been prioritized for the adjacent resources that are next to our coast. We don't know.... We've searched the records, and we can't come up with an allocation that has appreciated our adjacency, our dependency and what it means to indigenous peoples to be involved in commercial fisheries. We can see what happens when indigenous peoples continue to get marginalized. We've seen this throughout the Maritimes, for instance, in other fisheries, so this decision was hugely important.

What I'm hearing, sir, around this decision is not so much a decision around the resource itself and whether or not the 18,000 TAC is really about the impact that it's going to have on the sustainability of the resource. Really, most of the discussion is around management. It's around allocations and who gets what. You will note that even with the FFAW's own interventions and the positions that it has taken.

When the FFAW took a position around northern cod, it wanted much more than the 18,000. It wanted a bigger allocation, as high as 30,000 or 40,000 tonnes, you know. That's almost double what the minister brought in this June. The equitable part, of course, is that the people closest to the resource, dependent on the resource, who have historically not benefited from their own resources, should be prioritized and should have an equitable share of that resource.

It's hard to express in words just how meaningful this has been for our older fishers who have gotten back into fishing cod and for our young people who are, in many ways, engaged now in a new fishery.

When it comes to processing, sir, I can tell you that all of the inshore quota in 2J was landed in 2J and was processed in 2J. I can tell you also that the indigenous quotas will all be harvested as well.

[Mike Kelloway, Liberal, Cape Breton—Canso, NS]

Thank you, sir. I appreciate it.

[The Chair, Liberal, Ken McDonald]

Thank you, Mr. Russell. We've gone past time a little bit.

Before I go to Madame Desbiens, I want to say that we're going to end off at Ms. Barron.

Madame Desbiens, you have two and a half minutes or less, please.

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

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Mr. Best, I'll come back to you later if I have time.

Mr. Russell, you voiced concerns about your community's ability to maintain access to a resource that contributes to both your traditions and your diet.

Do you trust DFO to take this issue into account in a meaningful way in the near future?

[Todd Russell]

Thank you.

It's an interesting word—trust. We have been involved much more in the processes that DFO has in place around science, assessments and surveys, all of those kinds of internal processes to DFO that touch on external partners or users. We have been involved much more in those particular processes.

Is that building trust? I think it's building some trust in the system, but I think trust really gets built when we see that what we bring to the table is reflected in decisions.

With the decision of the minister in June 2024, I can see that what we have contributed to the process has been heard and reflected. Do I share some of the concerns that others have raised? Yes, but at the same time, I think there is trust being built and developed as we go through these very intricate and important processes.

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

Thank you.

[The Chair, Liberal, Ken McDonald]

Thank you, Madame Desbiens. Your two and a half minutes are up. It's not a lot of time, but it was used wisely.

We'll now go to Ms. Barron for two and a half minutes or less, please, to finish off.

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

Thank you, Chair.

I think I'm going to address my last question to Mr. Best, who's here with us today.

Thanks for all of your testimony.

Mr. Best, we spoke a little about the impacts on my family through the cod moratorium but also around your multi-generational fishing family in Newfoundland. I'm wondering if you could speak a little bit to the impacts, in particular the fact that, through a stewardship fishery model over the last three decades, there has been so much done by local fishers to work on the rebuilding of the cod stock.

Can you talk a little about the impacts and the work that's been done to rebuild this fishery over the last few generations?

[Glen Best]

In what context do you mean, “work that's been done”? Can you elaborate a bit?

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

There are a couple of things. First of all, I'm curious about the impacts that the cod moratorium had on your family but also the fact that, since then, we know that there have been so many fishers who have done work to ensure that they are protecting the cod. There has been a huge investment in changing the methods in which the fishing has been done and so on. Perhaps you can speak to that.

[Glen Best]

Yes. Thank you.

Back in 1992, the impacts on the community were huge. The impacts were big for all communities.

As I told you earlier, the community of Fogo Island had 5,000 people. There were 1,000 kids in school in 1987 when I graduated. My wife's a teacher. Now we're at about a little over 2,000 people in the community, and we're at fewer than 200 kids. We lost generations of harvesters. We lost culture. These are things that you'll never get back in Newfoundland.

Like I said, the lowly cod asked so little but gave so much. It had such a large impact on Newfoundland and Labrador.

Since then, we've gone through the pain. We were lucky that we had shellfish to fill in the gap. Now the shellfish are starting to decline again. Over the years, people had very few fish to catch, and they took just the small amounts of fish that they had to catch. Now we're transitioning to new gear types like longline with the help of the Atlantic fisheries fund. Those are sustainable ways to go forward. You can catch better quality fish like that.

Those are a couple of examples of how the cod has impacted and how we've moved forward.

[The Chair, Liberal, Ken McDonald]

Thank you, Ms. Barron. You had two seconds left, I think. You won't get in a question in that time frame.

I want to thank the witnesses for appearing today. Mr. Russell, Ms. Rowe and Mr. Best, thank you for coming, testifying and showing the committee what knowledge you have on this particular subject.

We're going to suspend now to go in camera to do committee business.

Again, thank you to everyone who participated.

[Proceedings continue in camera]