Mr. Tobin.
Evidence of meeting #93 for Fisheries and Oceans in the 44th Parliament, 1st Session. (The original version is on Parliament’s site, as are the minutes.) The winning word was illegal.
A recording is available from Parliament.
Evidence of meeting #93 for Fisheries and Oceans in the 44th Parliament, 1st Session. (The original version is on Parliament’s site, as are the minutes.) The winning word was illegal.
A recording is available from Parliament.
Noon
A voice
Mr. Tobin.
Noon
Liberal
Ken Hardie Liberal Fleetwood—Port Kells, BC
Was it Brian Tobin, with the net that was scooped from a Portuguese vessel that was illegally fishing? He piled it up on a barge in New York Harbor.
Why isn't that still happening? Why aren't we out there disrupting the bad guys from foreign fishing fleets, who are basically poaching our fish?
Mr. Knight, can you comment on that?
Noon
Fisheries Management Consultant, As an Individual
I'm well familiar with that incident back in 1994, Mr. Hardie.
What I can tell you is that we've made leaps and bounds and strides of progress, particularly on our east coast, within the NAFO regulatory area. We do not have unregulated vessels there. They're all from contracting parties to the Northwest Atlantic Fisheries Organization regional fisheries management organization.
There has been a suite of rules put in place that now require illegal fishing activity to be sophisticated.... I'll put it this way, as one enforcement officer said many years ago: They're no longer catching and misreporting in truckloads. They're doing it in bucketfuls. There's still a need for constant surveillance there, but we don't have that complete blatant disregard for the rules on an ongoing widespread basis like we had back in 1994.
12:05 p.m.
Liberal
The Chair Liberal Ken McDonald
Thank you, Mr. Hardie.
We'll now go to Ms. Desbiens for six minutes or less, please.
12:05 p.m.
Bloc
Caroline Desbiens Bloc Beauport—Côte-de-Beaupré—Île dOrléans—Charlevoix, QC
Thank you, Chair.
I’d like to thank the witnesses for participating in our study. It’s courageous of them to testify about illegal fishing.
I’ll turn to Mr. Urbina, who’s an investigative journalist.
I’d like to take this opportunity to commend your work and that of journalists in general. Without all of you, it would be impossible to shed such a fair and impartial light on the reality that is sometimes experienced on the ground. I know that journalism is currently facing serious threats. It’s all the more important to highlight the value of the work you and all your colleagues do, Mr. Urbina.
Now, I’d like to know if you’ve investigated illegal fishing in Quebec, more specifically in the Gulf of St. Lawrence and on the St. Lawrence River.
12:05 p.m.
Director, The Outlaw Ocean Project
Thank you for the kind words. No, I have not.
12:05 p.m.
Bloc
Caroline Desbiens Bloc Beauport—Côte-de-Beaupré—Île dOrléans—Charlevoix, QC
In that case, I’m afraid I’ll have to turn to someone else. I may have a question for you at the end.
Mr. Knight, in all of this, I’m thinking about the resource. The last witnesses we met with helped us understand the extent to which illegal fishing, particularly in the case of the glass eel, had a significant impact on resource protection.
Have you been able to gather any data that would provide insight into what’s happening in Quebec in terms of illegal fishing, compared to the eastern portions of the Gulf?
12:05 p.m.
Fisheries Management Consultant, As an Individual
I'll speak about elvers in the general sense, in that to the best of my knowledge, given my experience, there's no elver fishery occurring anywhere else in eastern Canada. There have been, over the past 20 years, significant reductions in eel fishing in all provinces in eastern Canada. The elver fishery, to the best of my knowledge, occurs only in Nova Scotia, so it's difficult to make any comparison, other than saying that it doesn't happen anywhere else, to the best of my knowledge, so I don't think we can compute illegal activity from one province to the next that way.
12:05 p.m.
Bloc
Caroline Desbiens Bloc Beauport—Côte-de-Beaupré—Île dOrléans—Charlevoix, QC
I used glass eel fishing as an example, but have you identified other types of illegal catches in Quebec? What impact does this have on the resource in Quebec, whether it’s lobster or even other species whose harvesting is prohibited in principle, but which are being harvested anyway?
12:05 p.m.
Fisheries Management Consultant, As an Individual
I'll give you one or two examples.
One is in the crab fishery. I'm aware, based on my history and on working with my colleagues in Quebec over the years, that illegal harvests occur in the crab fishery through the misreporting of catches. In other words, someone has a quota of, let's say, 50 tonnes of crab, but they're able to land 60 or 65 tonnes of crab by a different mechanism that allows them to escape the rules that are in place, land more catch and get more money. I'm aware of that occurring in Quebec, probably on a relative scale compared to how it occurs in the rest of the gulf region and in the province of Newfoundland and Labrador.
When it comes to lobster fishing, I know there's some misreporting of lobster catch for the same reasons I mentioned earlier: People want to catch lobster but not to report all of it, because they want to avoid paying tax on their income. Based on my experience with my colleagues in Quebec, with whom I had very close connections over the time I was director of conservation and protection, unfortunately I believe that people in Quebec are just as likely to break the law as are those elsewhere in Canada, but, I would say, no more likely.
12:05 p.m.
Bloc
Caroline Desbiens Bloc Beauport—Côte-de-Beaupré—Île dOrléans—Charlevoix, QC
Without a doubt.
What would you say is the priority? Should we increase surveillance, including through technology, strengthen enforcement and impose more penalties? Should more people be deployed locally to raise awareness? Or would it be better to apply both solutions extensively to achieve a concrete solution to the problem?
12:10 p.m.
Fisheries Management Consultant, As an Individual
Yes, I think so.
I've always believed that education and stewardship are key elements of the conservation and protection program and that the C and P program needs to collaborate closely with harvesters on what the priorities are and on how to gain compliance in their area. At the same time, I think one of the things we need to be clear about is that in every fishery, we need a presence. Whether it's in the lobster fishery in Quebec or patrolling our 200-mile limit, we need to have a presence on the ground—it can't be done sitting in front of a computer screen. We need high-tech solutions as well, but in all cases, for an effective compliance program, we have to have a presence.
I would say the greatest thing we can do in Canada today to address the most difficult situations we have is to clarify the rules, let everyone know what the situation is and then carry out the enforcement program to enforce the rules.
12:10 p.m.
Liberal
The Chair Liberal Ken McDonald
Thank you, Madame Desbiens.
We'll go to Ms. Barron for six minutes or less.
Go ahead, please.
12:10 p.m.
NDP
Lisa Marie Barron NDP Nanaimo—Ladysmith, BC
Thank you, Mr. Chair, and thank you to the witnesses for being here.
I'm going to start with a question for Mr. Knight, and following that I will have questions for Ms. Elmslie.
Mr. Knight, perhaps you can clarify. I completely agree with many of the points you made around the importance of looking at indigenous rights, ensuring that appropriate information and clear information are made available, and ensuring that there are opportunities for indigenous and non-indigenous to understand what the roles are and how to work together. There's a lot of clarity missing, and I'm hearing from people from all the coasts of Canada about the ongoing frustration. This is a theme.
You said something at the beginning, and I want to make sure I provide the opportunity to get some clarification around it and to ensure there isn't any miscommunication. Your words were that indigenous people “feel they have a right”. I want to ask you to clarify why you used the phrase “feel they have a right” in there, just to make sure we're all on the same page.
12:10 p.m.
Fisheries Management Consultant, As an Individual
I would say that is a very difficult question.
It is a very contentious situation. In many cases, I think, right now, DFO finds itself in a situation where it's trying to sort out what exactly the right is, and that's particularly true, I believe, in the moderate livelihood fishery in the Maritimes. In the absence of DFO coming out and saying, “Yes, this is permitted,” or, “No, this is not permitted,” I think anarchy is going to reign.
That's why I would say at this point in time, just to put it into parameters, that they feel they have the right. I'm not in a position to make the determination on that, and I believe DFO is struggling. I believe it may require the court to make those clarifications. As I said earlier, the risk of not making those clarifications is probably larger than the risk of going to court to have things clarified for everyone.
12:10 p.m.
NDP
Lisa Marie Barron NDP Nanaimo—Ladysmith, BC
Thank you, Mr. Knight. I think, again, it really reaffirms the importance of having clear information available for everybody involved.
Welcome back to you both, Mr. Knight and Ms. Elmslie.
Ms. Elmslie, I wanted to ask you about some previous discussions.... It's interesting to see the many ways in which our previous study on labelling and this study overlap. We spoke quite a bit in our previous study about the boat-to-plate traceability program that was promised in the 2019 ministerial mandate letter. You spoke today about the importance of a full-chain, boat-to-plate process.
In a previous meeting, I asked our assistant deputy minister, Mr. Adam Burns, about what's currently in place around the electronic reporting. I just want you to hear his response, which was that there is an expansion on the electronic logbook program coming up, that it's currently largely voluntary—which is, of course, what we spoke about before—and that they want to “move to a system in which logbooks are entirely electronic so that we have real-time data coming from harvesters to better understand the state of play of a particular fishery and also to make it easier for them to provide us that information.”
I bring this up because it feels like everybody is on the same page around the importance of this. I keep hearing about the importance of it, but I'm not seeing that action happening in the timely manner required. It should have happened a long time ago.
I'm wondering if you could provide some thoughts around the importance of the electronic reporting and what you're currently seeing in place in this capacity.
12:15 p.m.
Campaign Director, Oceana Canada
It's something we also touch on in our fishery audit, and it's something that we refer to as the “implementation gap”. What we're seeing is that DFO often has a lot of very good policies. It makes a lot of commitments to things, but the actual implementation of those things is not happening.
We're seeing this with the fishery monitoring policy. It's an excellent policy, and a lot of work has gone into it, but it hasn't been implemented yet, so that needs to be implemented and expedited.
I think it speaks a bit to one of my recommendations. In the U.S., there is a report to Congress on multiple factors that happen. It's not only the status of stocks, but other things like work plans and where the government work plans are. We don't have a similar accountability system for DFO here in Canada. One of the things that we would call for is a report to Parliament so that there is some accountability from DFO on its commitments and its work plans and whether it's implementing its policies.
We recently saw from the Auditor General's report on monitoring the gaps that exist. Again, there is a response from DFO, but we need to keep that accountability and the follow-up there so that things are implemented and things are moved forward.
12:15 p.m.
NDP
Lisa Marie Barron NDP Nanaimo—Ladysmith, BC
Thank you, Ms. Elmslie.
Both you, Ms. Elmslie, and Mr. Urbina spoke about the human rights abuses that are resulting from the illegal, unregulated and unreported fishery. Mr. Urbina spoke quite at length about the human rights abuses on the international stage.
I am unsure whether you can provide further insights into what you're hearing around human rights abuses internationally, but is there anything more domestic that you can share with us about the impacts of this illegal, unregulated and unreported fishing?
December 12th, 2023 / 12:15 p.m.
Campaign Director, Oceana Canada
Is that for me or Mr. Urbina?
12:15 p.m.
NDP
12:15 p.m.
Campaign Director, Oceana Canada
We have some research papers that I can submit to the committee that we've looked at before on the global abuses. Certainly, Mr. Urbina can speak to that in more detail.
Without a traceability system.... Right now, we estimate that about 30% of the global catch comes from IUU sources, so it's making it onto Canadian plates. Without a traceability system in place, we can't document when we go back.
We had that issue when we talked to a lot of different restaurants when we did our DNA testing. We've gone into restaurants and asked them the source of their fish, and a lot of those restauranteurs are very frustrated, because they don't know. They'll show us the box of fish that arrives with really no information at all on it.
It's very hard, when you're trying to keep systems in place, to really trace back where it's from. I can find out right now, or most of us can find out, for a beef cow, almost what feedlot in Alberta it came from, but we can't find the same for our fish, even for the vendors who are selling them.
There are some excellent programs, like Skipper Otto and others, that are doing that, and there are some traceability systems that MSC and Metro have put in place, but again, that's piece by piece. We need a full system, so that everybody is aware of that and we can filter out what we don't want to have on our plates.
12:15 p.m.
Liberal
The Chair Liberal Ken McDonald
Thank you, Ms. Elmslie.
We have to go now to our next questioner.
We have Mr. Arnold for five minutes or less, please.
12:15 p.m.
Conservative
Mel Arnold Conservative North Okanagan—Shuswap, BC
Thank you, Mr. Chair. I thank the witnesses for being here. Time is short.
Mr. Urbina, in August 2020 a colleague and I wrote to Canada's federal fisheries minister to express our concerns on news reports of 260 vessels from the People's Republic of China's distant-water fishing fleet pillaging fish populations in international waters beyond Ecuador's exclusive economic zone, in a significant fishing migration route between the Galapagos Islands and the Ecuadorian coast. When we received a response from the minister, she mentioned international agreements and discussions but nothing about the actions being taken by Canada or partners to confront China in response to conduct in their distant-water fishing fleet in the Galapagos.
Mr. Urbina, are you aware of any governments or transitional organizations confronting China in response to their pillaging of the Galapagos fisheries in summer 2020?
12:20 p.m.
Director, The Outlaw Ocean Project
The 200 to 300 vessels that you're referring to are largely squid jiggers. They go every year, and have been for a decade, to those high seas waters near the Galapagos. We actually boarded those vessels and inspected their conditions, their supply chain, etc. We traced many of those vessels back to the Canadian market, the U.S. market and others.
To answer your question more on point, the Chinese government, interestingly, because of the bad press that began in 2020 but has continued since then about that specific fleet and that specific location, ordered its vessels—that fleet specifically—to back off and stay 50 miles away from the line. Most of the vessels were already outside Ecuador's and Galapagos waters. They instructed them to stay further out.
That doesn't mean that many of those vessels are not still engaging in IUU. In fact, they are, and we've documented them. Many of the same vessels are invading Argentinian waters, Peruvian waters, etc.
In terms of government action, there's been very little. Canadian mechanisms of pressure would be customs. It would be at—
12:20 p.m.
Conservative
Mel Arnold Conservative North Okanagan—Shuswap, BC
Thank you.
In your view, why aren't governments of countries like Canada and the U.S. confronting China to press them to stop the illegal activities of their distant-water fishing fleet?