Fisheries Committee on April 13th, 2022

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

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Again, thank you to the officials for being here.

I'll direct my questions through Mr. Sargent and he can determine which other department official may be best to answer.

Could you tell us what the stock assessment trends have been for capelin over the past number of years?

[Timothy Sargent]

Tony, do you want to talk about that?

I would say though that this stock has been quite volatile, so I suspect what Tony is going to say is that it's difficult to tease out real trends from that.

Tony.

[Tony Blanchard]

It's exactly what you said. It's been, particularly in 4RST, which we're talking about, a bit up and down, but nothing major up or major down. It's been up or down at a consistent level, I guess.

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

Thank you.

What has the department identified as possible contributing factors to any upward or downward population cycles?

[Tony Blanchard]

The major driver is environmental conditions. We can't pinpoint specifically which of those, but it appears that environmental conditions are the major driver in the capelin abundance.

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

When you say environmental conditions, do you mean climatic and ocean temperature conditions, or other environmental conditions, such as predation and so on?

[Tony Blanchard]

It is all of the above, I would think.

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

Predation is one of those potential factors in there.

[Tony Blanchard]

Potentially, it is. Probably the climatic conditions are more impactful.

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

What work is the department doing to try to determine which factors may be more influential?

[Tony Blanchard]

Those are the things that are discussed during the science assessment each year.

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

Have those been discussed in previous years?

[Tony Blanchard]

Yes.

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

What was identified in previous years?

[Tony Blanchard]

I think it was the water temperature for sure, food for the capelin, and those types of things. I don't have the specifics in front of me now to give you, but they were those types of things.

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

What steps are available to the department to address declining trends or a low assessment?

[Timothy Sargent]

Just to clarify, Mr. Chair, do you mean in terms of fisheries management measures or in terms of getting more data?

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

What tools are available to the department to turn around a low assessment?

[Timothy Sargent]

In terms of fisheries management, Mr. Chair, obviously we can adjust things like opening dates in an effort-based fishery. We can adjust TACs when there are quantitative limits. We can place restrictions around kinds of gear.

Those are all fisheries management tools that we have used in general, although not necessarily in this fishery or in all parts of this fishery.

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

Has the department ever looked at overall ecological conditions such as predator-prey ratios as part of the tools?

[Timothy Sargent]

Our assessments are designed to look at environmental factors. As we have discussed, predation is a factor, so to the best of our ability we try to understand what the predation factors are. They obviously feed into where we think the stock is going and how effective our management measures will be.

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

Thank you.

I want to change line a bit here. It looks like this entire management area is managed as one large zone. We have a couple of harvesters who are impacted and who would have a very small impact on the overall TAC or the fishery in general, yet their fishery is being restricted in their position.

I want to relate that to a different scenario on the west coast. Interior Fraser steelhead are on the brink of extinction. They come all the way up the Fraser system in my riding and up into North Okanagan—Shuswap. Other harvest fisheries are implicated or suggested to be maybe impacting those stocks, which are on the verge of collapse, yet those fisheries remain open.

Can you explain the difference in the two different management systems?

[Timothy Sargent]

For the 4RST capelin, when we say that we treat it as one stock, that means the science is done on a stock-wide basis. We have one stock assessment meeting and we have one advisory committee that deals with this stock, but that doesn't mean a stock is managed in the same way for each of the sub-areas, if you like.

That's why, for instance, the weir fishery that we're all here today to discuss opens at a different time from the 4R and 4S fisheries, and of course they use different gear types. Even if we manage it as one stock, we have the flexibility to have different opening dates and a variety of approaches to the fish management.

The stock is really referring to the science part and the assessment of the stock, but the actual fisheries management tools can certainly differ, depending on local circumstances.

[The Chair, Liberal, Ken McDonald]

Thank you, Mr. Arnold.

We will now go to Mr. Hardie for five minutes or less.

[Ken Hardie, Liberal, Fleetwood—Port Kells, BC]

You can hardly tell us apart, I know.

Through you, Mr. Chair, to Mr. Sargent, does DFO not have people on the ground in Madame Desbiens' riding to witness for themselves what the ice conditions are?