Fisheries Committee on March 30th, 2023

[Bobby Morrissey, Liberal, Egmont, PE]

In that balanced approach, Canada depends heavily for some of its key fisheries on the U.S., which is still our biggest market for seafood, at somewhere around 70%, then on the European Union. Can we take a risk with having those two marketplaces retaliate against Canada?

You can enter in the trade courts, which is a process that can take years and years. Could you give me an opinion on that? Does government have to be very cautious about how it moves in a harvest to ensure that our key trading partners, who we depend on, do not retaliate against us?

[Mervin Wiseman]

Look, I may not have the perfect solution to this, but I understand from the motion that this committee has and the terms of reference, that, basically, to do the work you're going to do to solidify the report.... You're going to be travelling internationally.

[Bobby Morrissey, Liberal, Egmont, PE]

No, we're not. That was turned down.

[Mervin Wiseman]

It was turned down, was it? Well, find some other way to ask Norway how they managed to do that. Ask Iceland. Ask other countries that seem to have the fortitude to stand up and say they're going to do what they have to do to harvest their seals, and to do it on behalf of their fish harvesters and the people of their countries. They did it, and they seem to be doing quite fine.

I think it's a question of priority and standing up. Will it be easy? Not necessarily, but other countries seem to be able to do it. I think the answer lies there somewhere.

I think, yes, we have to take the risk. I don't see what the pat answer is to that, but I certainly don't see it as putting your tail between your legs and running, because that's what we've been doing up to this point.

[Bobby Morrissey, Liberal, Egmont, PE]

I agree. Successive governments have been unable to create or find a marketplace that sustains a seal hunt.

Mr. Chair, I have just one closing comment, because there was a reference made to the minister's statement, and I just want the record to be clear. The minister was asked to make that statement by fishers in Newfoundland, who said they wanted to hear a minister actually say publicly that seals eat fish.

That's why Minister Murray made that statement, because she was asked to by the fishers who were attending that summit.

With that, Chair, I don't have any other questions.

[The Chair, Liberal, Ken McDonald]

Thank you. You're right on your mark for six minutes. Perfect.

We'll now go to Madame Michaud for six minutes or less, please.

[Kristina Michaud, Bloc, Avignon—La Mitis—Matane—Matapédia, QC]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

I also want to thank you, Mr. Cleary, Mr. Wiseman and Mr. Rose. We're so glad to have you with us.

Mr. Cleary, I just want you to know that I really enjoyed your speech. It was very original. It's too bad that sometimes, you have to use sarcasm to make a point. In any case, I certainly got your point, so well done.

I've been a member of the House of Commons for three and a half years, and it's true that I've never talked about my pension plan. However, this is the first time I've sat on the Standing Committee on Fisheries and Oceans, and I am talking about seals, so there's a first time for everything.

What you and the other witnesses said today makes a lot of sense. It is completely mind-boggling to me that Fisheries and Oceans Canada isn't listening to fish harvesters and seal hunters, because I think we're really at a crossroads, the point where something needs to be done. You've been saying that yourself for years.

What everyone seems to agree on today is the need to control the pinniped population. Let's say that tomorrow morning, the federal government starts taking an interest in the seal hunt. What do you think DFO's priorities should be?

Should it issue more commercial fishing licences, provide more investment for processing plants, for example, opening up access to local or international markets, or develop a marketing plan?

What do you think are the first steps DFO should take?

[Ryan Cleary]

As I said in the opening remarks, the first steps are an action plan within six months: action, action and action.

I know a lot of harvesters who shoot on sight. If they are in a boat and they see a seal that's interfering with what they are doing, they take the seal out. I think a lot more of that is going to be happening. It's time for the rubber to hit the road.

I don't know exactly how it works in Australia in terms of kangaroos and the 100 billion animals they have taken out in the past decade or so. I don't know if there's a market for all that meat and all that skin.

I do know that, again, with a population of 520,000, our fisheries and our rural communities are suffering. Every single commercial species is suffering because of seals. It's time for action, and if the Government of Canada doesn't take action, I have no problem with the fishermen and fisherwomen of Newfoundland and Labrador taking action, because it has come to that point.

[Mervin Wiseman]

As quickly as I can, on the ground, we have to get at the fundamentals. Science is the fundamental function of where we need to go.

There was a milestone achieved in St. John's last November, not necessarily because the minister said, “Seals eat fish,” and I would hate to think that she said that under duress, by the way, but she did say it. Somewhere in the bureaucracy there's a problem. I don't think it's at the ministerial level, other than the accountability of it.

For years, it was purported that seals have no impact on the ecosystem. The chief scientist for DFO was the one who said that and was highly offended that somebody would suggest that. Now we have come out of this summit with a fundamental change in science, so we're going there. What we didn't achieve, though, at the summit was having a fundamental approach, strategically, to do the marketing. Some of the gateways to marketing are through our international agreements.

How could we allow the EU to pass morality clauses on the actions of fishermen engaged in a legitimate fishery? We allow that, but we have levers through some of our trade negotiations to do something about that. The WTO has clauses to protect that. It has never been properly challenged—through the North American Free Trade Agreements and so on—to try to see if we can leverage the species protection act that the United States has to prevent us from getting our seal products in.

These are the items that we certainly have to address. Clearly, doing proper science now that we're supposed to be doing—we'll have to wait and see on that—will allow us then to neuter some of the outrageous and vacuous arguments that the animal welfare people keep using on us.

Somewhere within that fundamental science, by the way, it has to be acknowledged that fish harvesters do have a few clues about the population of seals, and they have a few clues about what they eat. I think that's important.

We have to factor into that mosaic of science the idea of pure science, as well as the empirical knowledge provided by fish harvesters who are out on the ocean every day.

[Kristina Michaud, Bloc, Avignon—La Mitis—Matane—Matapédia, QC]

I'd like to pick up on what you were saying, Mr. Wiseman.

Even if we all agree that we need to listen to the science, you think that DFO officials should communicate more with the people on the ground, because they know all too well that seals feed on all kinds of fish stocks. As you said, they're not picky.

Should communication between the department and the people on the ground be improved?

[Mervin Wiseman]

Absolutely. We have to utilize that information. It's not being properly utilized. Obviously, there are more parts to the equation than just the fish harvesters, but that's a piece that's missing. We have simply eliminated that from the equation. The idea, the science, that we have is predicated on our having to prove that it has no impact on fish populations, so we have to develop the proper terms of reference for the kind of science that we're doing.

I don't know what that is. We're going in the right direction, but nobody really knows yet exactly what the wording and the language is going to be around that. That's an important piece.

We heard from the witnesses today—the people who have lived on the water and understand the impacts—the frustration and the mistrust. There has to be a feeling of trust between the people who are on the oceans, the fish harvesters, and the government, DFO and science. The mistrust that's there now, when you hear ludicrous and silly statements from educated scientists saying 10 million seals have no impact on fish.... Come on; that's a joke. Even bureaucrats in Ottawa who have never been to the east or west coasts would know the difference in that.

[The Chair, Liberal, Ken McDonald]

Thank you, Madame Michaud.

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

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

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Thank you to our witnesses for being here.

If I could take a lighter note for just a second, I'm originally from Newfoundland; I'm not sure if you're aware. I was surprised to hear the joke was surrounding Kentucky Fried Chicken and not Mary Brown's. As an aside, I always preferred Mary Brown's.

[Voices]

Oh, oh!

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

I actually wanted to see if Mr. Wiseman wanted to take some of my time to speak to the committee today about some of his opening statement he was hoping to present.

[Mervin Wiseman]

Thank you for that.

A lot of what I said—I'll ad lib also here—was statements that were already made about the effect it has on the social and economic well-being of the families of, actually, hundreds and thousands of harvesters out there.

I shared my experience of growing up in a family of 14 and what it meant to get out there and harvest animals in the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s at a time when there were somewhere between 2.5 million and three million seals. We seemed to have a sustainable harvest at that point, although we agreed that we'd like to build a little onto that. I talked about that a fair amount.

Then, as we proceeded into the 1990s and 2000 and beyond, there seemed to be that dropping-off point that started to dictate that we were bringing about 40,000 to 50,000 seals to the marketplace. We went from that number of half a million seals in that period of time for reasons that I'm not sure anybody can entirely understand, quite frankly. Clearly, as I mentioned, we allowed the animal welfare people to really come in the back door, for reasons that were very nefarious.

I think the lack of science, or poor science—I spoke about that as well—and the rationalization for the kind of hunt we should have allowed these groups to come in and destroy the marketplace. I think all roads ultimately lead to the marketplace. I think we have to unravel that and understand that particular dynamic.

It was the pressure of the animal welfare groups, among others, that then allowed the kind of legislation we saw in the EU, which cut off a lot of populations and countries from accessing our products. Also, in the bilateral, trilateral and multilateral trade agreements and so on, there was always an absence of language around seal. It was taboo to even talk about it, let alone negotiate it.

We've missed something there. We've missed the gateway that would allow us to access these countries.

I didn't speak a lot about it, but I alluded very quickly to the idea of a marketing framework. There has always been an absence of a marketing framework. I say this because I was on the board of directors that travelled globally to market fur products in mink and fox in particular.

We grew the mink industry, by the way, to 125 million. We overstepped a little. We've had to rein that in. We've having challenges these days, because of the war in Ukraine, with our biggest buyers for long-haired furs in particular. In Russia, it's been eliminated. COVID in China and so on has been a problem; there's no question about that. Plus, their economy has really declined a lot. Those are geopolitical issues and so on that come and go, but we're still missing that fundamental framework that's needed for marketing and promotion.

We have had fashion shows with mink and fox in the great hall in China. Would they consider that for seals? Why weren't there seal products there? There's never been a collaboration with the marketing experts around the world to try to move that product out into the marketplace.

Denmark created the Great Greenland company. It's a massive enterprise that had a lot of success. They put a lot of money into the marketing of seals in Greenland—the same seals we are harvesting—and put them right into a world-renowned auction house in Copenhagen. They also put seal product and worked with seal fashion in one of the greatest fashion houses they've created, which exists in Denmark as we speak. There's never been any discussion with the Canadian government to consider moving seal product into these various venues and promoting it.

Unless we build that international marketing framework, we're going to continue to be in trouble. We can talk about domestic use of product even here in Canada, but it's not there.

Canada is not going to take us where we need to go. We can set some examples, of course—local use of products and so on—especially with some of the nutraceutical functional foods that we're now starting to derive from all this.

Here is the other leg up, the other piece of strategy that we could work on that we didn't have, let's say, with mink and fox. We could only talk about fur and fur products. We couldn't talk about full utilization of a mink carcass or of a fox carcass, because we were dealing with fur. We have fur from seals, but we now also have the fat, the meat products, the protein and all these functional foods.

I'm getting the flag that I've reached my time limit.

[The Chair, Liberal, Ken McDonald]

Thank you, Ms. Barron.

Mr. Wiseman was speaking about utilizing the fat, and I finished my last bottle of seal oil capsules the other day, so I have to replenish them.

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

[Brendan Hanley, Liberal, Yukon, YT]

Thank you.

I've really been enjoying this testimony, so I appreciate all three of you for appearing today.

I want to pick up on some of the themes that we've just been hearing from Mr. Wiseman.

I'll go back to you, Dr. Rose.

I've had the opportunity to look at some of your writings and learn of your experience, particularly regarding northern cod. One of the themes I think I'm picking up is the lack of investment in rigorous stock assessment over the years. Therefore, there's a lack of reliable data; therefore, erroneous conclusions are being drawn.

If we're going to try to continue to document the effects of seals on cod, and particularly if we actually get into serious augmentation of harvesting, can you talk about the importance of rebuilding our ability to survey cod and other fish stocks? How do we need to better include fishers' observations in the evidence gathering?

[Dr. George Rose]

That question is really important.

For a number of years we've had difficulty, particularly in the Atlantic regions, with surveys and vessels. This is well known to people. I was involved in this for 30-plus years. That goes a long way back, but it seems recently it's gotten more extreme. Some of the more important species that we have, commercially, depend on the surveys, and the surveys just aren't getting done.

It's been blamed on vessels that are not serviceable. We have new vessels coming in that weren't calibrated with the old vessels, and you can ask questions about why that wasn't done more efficiently and so on and so forth, but the bottom line, as was pointed out, is that the data—which is all-important in answering any of these questions that we have—for some of the key species, like capelin and now cod, just isn't there. What science does, when data isn't there, is create a model, which is just an abstraction. Unfortunately, models can prove just about anything, and that's sometimes where it goes astray.

If I can answer a previous question, I feel I have to put in some lines of defence for science. Certainly, in the questions of the interactions between pinnipeds and fish, it isn't universally accepted among working scientists that there's no effect. That's simply not the case.

There are very good examples within DFO, for example, of scientists who have published things that are definitely on the side of, “Yes, there's an influence. We may not be able to quantify it, because of the lack of data that we've referred to, but there's almost certainly an influence.” To argue otherwise is ecological nonsense. That's true on the east coast and the west coast.

When it comes right down to it, we need better information on these things. There's no doubt about that. It seems to me, particularly in the last few years, that the situation—far from getting better, which we hoped it would—has been getting much worse.

[Brendan Hanley, Liberal, Yukon, YT]

Thank you.

You spoke about the west coast, and I wanted to bring you back to the west coast, where you are already. It's around a focus.

One interesting suggestion that we had last week from Ken Pearce and Matt Stabler from the Pacific Balance Pinniped Society—I think it was Matt Stabler—was that they're ready to go. They could harvest 5,000 seals and evaluate the effect with a view to scaling up according to the results. In a way, it was to just get on with this and then evaluate what we do as part of a scientific assessment of harvesting and evaluation.

I wonder what your thoughts are on how that could work. Is that something you think could be scientifically justified in building our expertise? Also, I'm starting to go down that pathway of something we're apparently not supposed to be speaking about.

[Dr. George Rose]

Well, yes. This comes under the heading of what we used to call “experimental management”. Management is tough; there's no question about that. It's very difficult to know.

One way it operates right now is on model projections, which are always questionable at best. Another way to look at this is what you've just described. It's what we call “experimental management”. We don't know the outcome, but that's the whole idea.

Putting in place experiments like this is very interesting from the standpoint of management. From the standpoint of science, it's incredibly interesting to actually get real data on a well-controlled experimental basis that would involve harvesters. That's been spoken to before, and I totally agree with that. The involvement of harvesters is key to the success of any management. That would allow that. It would facilitate that in a big way.

Without going into specifics or details, in principle and in general from a science standpoint, my own view towards initiatives like that is very positive.

[The Chair, Liberal, Ken McDonald]

Thank you, Mr. Rose, and thank you, Mr. Hanley.

We'll now go to Madame Michaud for two and a half minutes, please.

[Kristina Michaud, Bloc, Avignon—La Mitis—Matane—Matapédia, QC]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Mr. Rose, in your opening remarks, you said that climate change would drive more migration north, with the expansion of populations of piscivorous pinnipeds on both coasts, namely California sea lions on the west coast and grey seals on the east coast.

I would like to hear you tell us more about the impact of climate change on pinnipeds. The hunt usually takes place from November to December. Is that still true? As we know, the ideal hunting season is now January to March, possibly due to climate change.

Do you think the dates should be adjusted?

Could you elaborate on the consequences of climate change?

[Dr. George Rose]

Climate change is impacting marine animal distributions, fish and mammals, right around the world. There's ample evidence of that. In some cases it's extreme, and in some cases it's minor.

Let me say a few words about the west coast first. In the case of pinnipeds, there have been massive increases in California sea lions in the Salish Sea, off southern British Columbia. In some ways, they could be called an invasive species: They were never here before, and they're big fish eaters—big salmon eaters—so this impact that's taking place is changing the predator-prey relations.

On the east coast, the best example of this, or probably the most extreme, is the expansion of grey seals. I did a lot of work...I spent half my life, it seemed, in Placentia Bay for a period of almost two decades some years ago, but I never, ever saw a grey seal. I haven't been there recently, but people I know there will tell me, and some of the others who are more knowledgeable of the current situation there could speak to this perhaps, that grey seals are now seen on the south coast of Newfoundland, and may even be colonizing there.

There you have another example of where climate is changing. Seals will respond to temperature in the ocean and also to prey distributions. If they can find those two favourable factors, they will move there, especially—and this is key—if their populations are expanding. It's like anything else: When a population expands in numbers, it's going to try to expand in area. They're not all going to stay in the same place as their populations increase.

Both of those things are happening. It's less clear what's happening on the northeast coast of Newfoundland and Labrador, because those are ice seals—the harp seals and hooded seals—and they may move north. I'm not sure about that.

[The Chair, Liberal, Ken McDonald]

Thank you, Dr. Rose. That is the end of our time for today's committee.

I want to say a big thank you to our guests in the second hour: Dr. Rose, Ryan Cleary, who's no stranger to the Hill, and Mervin Wiseman.