Thank you, Mr. Chair.
Thanks for the invitation to speak to you today.
I'm truly privileged to have grown up on this coast and fished on this coast all my life. It paid my way through university, and when I graduated, I was offered a teaching and research position—but I kept on fishing. My heritage is Scottish on my father's side, from a fishing community in the Orkney Islands, and Irish on my mother's side, from a farming community in County Meath. I'm George Patrick and Anne's son, James. I come from food production naturally.
I'm going to talk about four things: some of the impacts of the 1970 Fisheries Act pinniped protection measures on salmon, eulachon and shrimp; ecosystem-based management at Parks Canada; EBM at DFO; and the need for EBM to shift at DFO.
I'm going to follow the slides, which I believe were distributed to the committee members.
I took this picture last November in Cowichan Bay. This wharf was put in by fishermen eight years ago, and sea lions took over almost immediately. Between 300 to 400 sea lions spend September through November each eating 10 to 16 kilograms of returning salmon per day. Mariners cannot safely use that wharf.
DFO enacted Fisheries Act regulatory changes in 1970 to fully protect seals and sea lions. Prior to this, there was a five-dollar bounty on seal and sea lion noses in British Columbia. This graphic shows exponential growth then levelling out of the harbour seal population in the Strait of Georgia. The sport fishery is also graphed on this, and it shows an inverse relationship. Some sectors are licensed to protect their livelihoods from pinnipeds—not fishermen.
Sea lion population growth over the last 50 years continues to rise, as seen in this graphic here. They now consume more fish than the entire wild fishery—almost double. The decline in salmon catch started in the early 1970s. The fishery had a $1.2 billion restructuring in 1995-98. The most recent modelling data shows that the seal and sea lion biomass is still going up.
Along with salmon, the number of commercial harvesters has declined from 21,000 in 1990 to 5,000 just a couple of years ago—again, an inverse relationship to pinniped growth. Now we are reducing the salmon fishery even further, closing another 60% of the fishery. Seals and sea lions have a very diverse diet, and more than salmon are impacted. They eat over 54 different species.
I was at Knight Inlet this time last year. This is one of the most remote places on our coast. The eulachon run this time of year. Various species follow the eulachon in—seals, sea lions, porpoises. This photo shows a pod of porpoises herding eulachon, then having a feeding frenzy. First nations set up weirs in the river to harvest eulachons and produce grease—gold in these parts. Sea lions make their way up the river and harvest eulachon. Last year they found their way into the weir and feasted overnight. Like salmon, the eulachon population has been declining since the early 1990s. Sea lion and seal consumption of eulachon is estimated at 60% to 70% of the returning run size on our coast.
In the middle of the 1990s, the B.C. shrimp fishery was one of our most valuable fisheries—10 million per year just in Queen Charlotte Sound. The shrimp fishery has a bycatch of eulachon. In 1998 DFO blamed the shrimp fishery for eulachon decline. Seals and sea lions consume over 250 times the current shrimp-eulachon bycatch limits. DFO has kept the $10 million Queen Charlotte fishery closed for the last 25 years. Today, our shrimp fishery is worth less than a million dollars, meanwhile, our neighbours, Washington and Oregon, have a $300 million-plus shrimp fishery.
Parks Canada takes their role of ecosystem management seriously. They manage all species, including human activity. They have eradication and cull programs that keep ecosystems in balance. DFO endorses ecosystem-based management along our coast, but their main focus is managing harvesters. Their risk-adverse approach is to close fisheries first. Ecosystem-based management needs to be more than this.
If we want to eat fish from our ecosystem, DFO needs to manage more than just people. They need to be more like Parks Canada and do true ecosystem-based management.
Thank you very much.