Thank you very much, Mr. Chair, for the opportunity to both present and participate in your session.
I'm a retired DFO senior federal fisheries policy and operations manager. I've participated in multilateral and bilateral discussions throughout the last 25 to 30 years and I've also led delegations in Japan and led bilateral herring discussions with the U.S.
What I'd like to do quickly is make a brief presentation and then leave you with some brief questions.
Going back to the point that we see seals off the coast, I'm calling you from Chester, Nova Scotia. At one time, I was able to take my daughters fishing off the coast, and now I take my granddaughters seal watching, because there are no fish. The distinction has not been lost on the preceding generations.
The first of my points that I'd like to go into—and I'll read from them and leave them with a question—is that DFO has indicated that they're applying ecosystem-based management approaches to stock assessments. In the abundance of a formal seal stock assessment, concerns exist as to whether DFO has, currently is, or will restrict commercial allocations of traditional fish stocks like cod, capelin, mackerel, etc., to support seal populations.
As many of you are aware, many commercial fish stocks are becoming threatened or endangered despite tighter efforts, controls, and increased monitoring and enforcement, and in many cases seemingly lower allocations are set, to the point where many fisheries are either closed or subject to a sentinel fishery status, yet many of these stocks are not indicating stability or increasing in stock abundance.
As many of us know, there are limited data on seal diets, at least within the Canadian zone, which has led to surmising that seals consume an insignificant amount of fish. In recent discussions with DFO, it was suggested that seals eat few mackerel, but it's unknown where this diet study was conducted and whether it was during the mackerel migration or off season.
The question that this leaves me with, and it's presented to the committee and to DFO, is this: How can DFO apply an ecosystem-based management without applying the impact of seals on fish stocks?
The second point I'd like to raise is that the Atlantic seal science task team provided a series of recommendations in their report of April 2022. Those recommendations included opportunities to increase the fishing industry's involvement in seal science projects and ways to better communicate scientific findings to the fishing industry. They also included identifying seal impacts on fish stock rebuilding plans and included integrated fisheries management plans where appropriate. A key recommendation was to initiate a seal summit, which was convened in St. John's in the fall of 2022 and was intended to include collaboration and discussions among scientists, commercial harvesters, indigenous groups, and federal, provincial and territorial representatives.
The Baltic Sea is known as a sea basin under ecological stress, and the seal-fishery conflict in the Baltic expanded over the whole region, becoming increasingly more difficult to solve. Solutions to mitigate the conflict have not been adequate, and the impact of seals on coastal capture fisheries and aquaculture has been distressing for the fishery sector. Seal populations have been growing fast during the last 35 years, and opportunities for direct management of the populations remain limited.
As a result, regional solutions for mitigating the seal-fishery conflict in the Baltic Sea, an interdisciplinary synthesis project called RESOCO, funded by the Nordic council of ministers fisheries co-operation program, was convened during August 22-23 of 2022. The core aim of this program was to build an interdisciplinary synthesis and up-to-date Nordic knowledge and best practices and set the stage for alternative solutions on how to effectively reconcile seal-fishery conflict in the Baltic Sea. It sounds familiar.
The project was coordinated by Finland, Sweden, Denmark and Estonia, and the proceedings were published in January 2023. I attached, when I sent the information in, the publication in PDF form for that, and contacts if you need them.
The purpose of referencing the Atlantic seal science task Team report and the RESOCO report is that they had a similar theme—namely, a substantive increase in seal populations that is negatively impacting the social and economic viability of coastal communities.
To that point, the Baltic conference proceedings were published and widely distributed, as well as the Atlantic seal science task team report—