Fisheries Committee on Dec. 7th, 2023

[Stanley King]

No, they have not, but you're right. It's an ongoing 14% temporary expropriation. They just keep taking it for no compensation. They say it's going to be temporary, but it's ongoing.

[The Vice-Chair, Conservative, Mel Arnold]

Thank you, Mr. Perkins.

Now we're over to Mr. Hardie for five minutes.

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

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Ms. Suchan, are you able to track a vessel that is live, goes dark, and then becomes live again? Are you then able to identify vessels that exhibit this kind of behaviour?

[Dr. Minda Suchan]

Identification is different from detection. We pull in other sorts of—

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

I need a very simple answer, because I have lots of questions in little time.

[Dr. Minda Suchan]

Okay.

Yes, we are, in certain circumstances.

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

Are you able to tell us the nation of origin of most of the vessels exhibiting this kind of behaviour? You may not have this at hand. Is it something you would be able to develop?

[Dr. Minda Suchan]

Yes, that is something we work on in conjunction with customers like DFO.

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

It would be worthwhile knowing where these vessels are and determining whether, like many vessels in the ocean fleet, they're registered in Panama. That would be very worthwhile to know, because that's another avenue.

Mr. King, what do you know about the end use of the product? You say they capture the elvers. They're taken to China to grow into full-size eels. What happens to that product? Is it consumed entirely in China, or does it go someplace else?

[Stanley King]

A large majority of it is consumed in China, but it's also exported throughout Asia. It's very large in the sushi market, so some of it comes back to Canada. Some of it comes back to North America and is served in a few different formats.

The growth rate is about one year of aquaculture. That's why they need a constant supply of elvers to keep up.

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

A human rights group is starting to focus on Chinese seafood processing, because of the use of Uyghurs and others in slave labour, etc. That's another avenue that I think we need to investigate.

I would not want to be an enforcement officer out on the river, with hundreds of people doing illegal things. It is dangerous. It occurs to me that if there's no money in it, the problem will go away. What do we do to take the money out of it?

One thing we heard in earlier testimony is lack of intelligence—the lack of knowing who, in fact, is benefiting the most. It's not the people on the river. It's the people up the totem pole from those people. This includes provincially regulated processors, which are probably handling some of this stuff and turning a blind eye. I don't know.

What about intelligence efforts? Can you sense anything like that going on?

[Stanley King]

Last year, when they asked us to temper our expectations around enforcement—boots on the ground and riverside at night—they said, “We're going to concentrate on big-picture stuff. We're going to concentrate on getting the buyers and exporters.” Well, that obviously hasn't come to fruition. I don't know why, but I think that if CBSA took a fair chunk out of the exports that have already been paid for, it would dry up this market. Why aren't they doing that? I don't know.

You could come to the river with me at night and follow these guys right to their house, then to the airport. They're not trying to hide. It's not clandestine crime. It's out in the open.

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

When they're at the airport, obviously putting something into a container to be shipped on an aircraft, are there any export permits needed, or are any presented that you're aware of?

[Stanley King]

It's my opinion that they mislabel the packages. We've gone out to the airport and used their X-ray machine with a box of lobster and a box of elvers. We put them through the X-ray machine, and they looked identical, so it's easy for a company.... Nova Scotia ships out a lot of lobsters to Asia, a lot, so I think that they can get away, most of the time, with telling the CBSA agent that they're lobsters, not elvers.

That's where DFO comes in. They have to inform the CBSA that, for these four weeks during the season, if they see a bunch of packages come in, they have to open one up. You could really put a dent in the whole criminal enterprise, but they don't want to do that. I think it's opening a can of worms for the government, and they would sooner turn a blind eye.

[The Vice-Chair, Conservative, Mel Arnold]

Thank you.

We'll move on now to Madame Desbiens for two and a half minutes, please.

[Caroline Desbiens, Bloc, Beauport—Côte-de-Beaupré—Île d’Orléans—Charlevoix, QC]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Mr. Collin, I must say I'm very concerned about the future of the fisheries in Quebec. I wouldn't want to make you say anything you don't want to say, but the department hasn't responded to the brief you submitted in 2021. Nothing has changed. Once you've reached your limit of 22,500 pounds of fish per week, you go back to port and watch the others fish.

Do you think the department has simply abandoned Quebec?

[Ghislain Collin]

I think there is a double standard.

There are measures that have to be complied with in Quebec, failing which fishers are sanctioned. Quebeckers can pay fines. Those kinds of sanctions are applied nowhere else in Canada.

We feel somewhat isolated from other fishers. We've handed our resource over others.

[Caroline Desbiens, Bloc, Beauport—Côte-de-Beaupré—Île d’Orléans—Charlevoix, QC]

I'm trying to understand why we've let down Quebec fishers in particular, when they discharge their legal duty to report fishery-related data more than anyone else. If anyone is acting legally, it's them because they report everything they harvest.

How do you explain that?

[Ghislain Collin]

It's inexplicable.

What I told our members the first time the fishery was shut down is that they would be receiving compensation. They had done their work for years and had paid for dockside landing audit services and hail-in‑related services. I told them that Fisheries and Oceans Canada had the history of all that. The departmental officials know them and know that they've harvested the resource.

At first, I thought we'd work with a group of fishers, the trawlers and fishers who had filed reports, including the Quebec pelagic fishers. However, we were ignored and abandoned. We've had no meetings with the minister to date.

[Caroline Desbiens, Bloc, Beauport—Côte-de-Beaupré—Île d’Orléans—Charlevoix, QC]

Thank you very much.

[The Vice-Chair, Conservative, Mel Arnold]

Thank you, Madame Desbiens. That's right on time.

Ms. Barron, you have two and a half minutes now, please.

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

Thank you very much, Chair.

I have other questions for the other witnesses as well, but I'm stuck on one point that was made by Mr. King.

Mr. King, you mentioned that there are elvers going overseas and coming back as sushi to Canada. As a committee, we did a study on the importance of labelling because of things like this, and I'm wondering if you could speak a little about how you know that they're coming back. Is there labelling that says this? Do you have any information that you can share around ways Canadians and people in your local community can be educated on what's required to be able to differentiate between legally caught elvers and illegally caught ones, to try to keep the local economy local?

[Stanley King]

Unfortunately, there's no good way to differentiate between illegally caught fish and legally caught fish right now when you're at the supermarket. We hope that a traceability program could eventually be expanded to have some kind of seal or verification on the packaging to show that the fish coming back was responsibly caught. We hope that will happen one day in the future, but it doesn't happen now.

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

Thank you.

With the time that I have left, I'm going to ask Ms. Suchan a question.

When you were speaking, Ms. Suchan, you talked about the radar satellite being very effective on the water but not under the water. What about beside the water?

I'm thinking about the opportunities for us to use technology to help increase the efficiency of follow-up and accountability around illegal, unreported and unregulated fishing that's happening along the side.

[Dr. Minda Suchan]

Absolutely. As long as it's above the water and not under the water, along coastlines and even on certain land areas, we are also able.... Radar technology can come in and monitor certain activity as well.

There are various land and maritime applications. I've been focused a bit more on the maritime opportunities, but certainly it's along the coastlines as well.

We have different types of radar that go out there and can detect different sizes, so the size of the object, the size of the ship, the size of the boat and the material of the boat all dictate how our radar can detect and image that, as well as bringing other types of data in.

Sometimes, for our radar satellites, we have a very broad area, but we can bring in other satellites, like optical satellites or higher-resolution satellites that come in and can get more detailed information and more specific imagery to help with the situation as well.