Thank you, Mr. Chair.
Greetings to everyone.
I would like to make a few broad ecological statements first about the situation on our east and west coasts, and then maybe get to some more specifics as time allows for your questions.
I think it's beyond dispute that the marine ecosystems on both our east and west coasts are what I call out of kilter, which is very different from the past norms that supported our fisheries on both coasts for hundreds of years. One of the chief symptoms of this “out-of-kilterness” is a huge relative increase in some cases—and in other cases not as huge—in pinnipeds relative to the things they eat, which is almost everything in the ecosystem, but especially our commercially important fishes.
In [Technical difficulty—Editor] ecosystem that will have a pyramid of what we call trophic energy, or you look at it as biomass. In simple terms, there should be a lot more small things than large things, because large things eat smaller things in generality. You should see that pyramid. That's what sustainable ecosystems look like.
If you look at, for example, our northern cod ecosystem off Newfoundland and Labrador, what you see is the exact opposite. What you see is that the biomass of seals is greater than the biomass of cod and capelin put together in that ecosystem. This is an extreme case of being out of kilter.
Another thing that's really important in the ecological sense is that most of the pinniped species are migratory. They can sustain very high populations, not based on the commercial species that we're talking about, but on other things. The potential impacts on the commercial species can be looked at as collateral damage from the standpoint of the pinnipeds. They don't need to be focusing on those species to have that big effect.
That's kind of the case. If we look at the case of harp seals in Newfoundland, which is on people's minds, some of the better studied cases are in the southern Gulf of St. Lawrence with grey seals. That is clearly an example of the cod stock there, which, according to some of our better scientists—Dr. Swain and his colleagues down that way—could even face extirpation because of pinniped predation.
The west coast here, out in the Pacific, is not immune from this either. There has been new immigration of California sea lions into the coastal areas of British Columbia. They're moving north. This brings in the climate change impact, which is affecting just about everything.
Recent studies by a colleague of mine, Dr. Carl Walters at UBC, have shown fairly convincingly that pinniped predation has severely impacted Fraser River salmon stocks, and it is one of the reasons why—out here on the west coast as well—we're seeing this kind of inverted pyramid of biomass in our ecosystems. Depending on what your goal is in managing ecosystems.... If it is commercial fisheries, it's hard to look at this positively.
To get to some specific things that I'm sure you're interested in, the northern cod ecosystem off Newfoundland and Labrador is where I spent most of my career. I've been retired now for a number of years, but I spent most of my career there as a working scientist on the fish stocks.
The system there is extreme, as I mentioned earlier. I take exception with the DFO statement. If you look at their brochure on harp seals, they state that harp seal predation was not a significant factor in the lack of cod recovery, and there was no evidence that harp seals negatively impacted capelin. I know the studies this is based on. This is based on a couple of studies by colleagues over a decade ago. However, I think the evidence for this—that they have no impact, particularly on capelin—is quite weak, and in some cases there's really no substantial evidence of that at all.
That's one of the things I would like to stress from the ecological side, though. The effects that pinnipeds can have, or that any predators can have, are not necessarily direct. They can be indirect. The best example that I could use is that the effects on cod, for example, might be actually through capelin. By influencing capelin, you will influence cod.