Good afternoon, Mr. Chair and everybody. Thank you for having me.
My name is Murray Ned, executive director for the Lower Fraser Fisheries Alliance. My ancestral name is Kwilosintun, and I'm a member of Sumas First Nation.
Our organization provides advocacy and technical support related to fish, fisheries and fish habitat to 30 first nations along the lower Fraser River in British Columbia.
In preparation for today, I inquired about the definition of “illegal, unreported and unregulated fisheries”. What I got back was broad and general, so it seemed the meaning of these terms is more a matter of interpretation rather than a formal legal definition. I'll offer my interpretation through the lens of articles 4, 5, 18, 19 and 26 of the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.
At the international scale, I've been a commissioner for the Pacific Salmon Commission since 2013. I was appointed by the Minister of Fisheries and not my own nation or the first nations of British Columbia. At that venue my formal obligation is to Canada, not first nations.
The integrated fisheries management plan is the instrument used by the DFO in the Pacific region to manage salmon fisheries. First nations are only recognized as advisers who can make recommendations, not decision-makers. Similarly, the Pacific Salmon Treaty process doesn't recognize first nations as representatives with authority over their own territories and resources.
There are many examples in the past year of decisions made through these regimes that did not respect UNDRIP and our own indigenous laws, and I'll share a few here.
U.S. commercial pink fisheries intercepted Fraser-bound sockeye, while at the same time there was no Canadian commercial total allowable catch or FSC due to conservation concerns. The U.S. initially retained sockeye, including stocks of concern, and then discarded dead or live sockeye in subsequent fisheries, compromising both conservation priorities and our own first nation priority access.
Licence conditions for the lower Fraser first nations targeting chinook for FSC made it mandatory to discard all sockeye bycatch, dead or alive, even though there were provisions for some sockeye retention through DFO's low abundance exploitation rate modelling. Discarding and wasting fish is against the historical and current laws of our lower Fraser first nations.
The international Alaskan District 104 fisheries continue to intercept Fraser River sockeye, including stocks of concern. These are all the points given here. Fraser River chinook stocks of concern were intercepted domestically in marine mixed-stock recreational fisheries, while conservation of these stocks and overall FSC needs were unmet. Canadian commercial trawl fisheries intercepted Fraser River juvenile chinook, including stocks of concern. Countless salmon redds were damaged by recreational fisheries that allow hundreds of people access to tributaries of the lower Fraser during critical salmon migration periods. Recreational catch and release fisheries resulted in significant chinook and coho mortality, the very same fish we're trying to conserve for the Fraser River.
Our nations acknowledge that there are challenges with our members, who may be involved in illegal, unreported and unregulated fisheries as defined by Canada. However, we also know that Canada's governance and management systems are not protecting salmon from much more significant impacts, even while regulating them. The reality is that DFO is the only body with the Canadian legal authority and capacity to enforce their own laws, many of which are inconsistent with our inherent laws and construed now as illegal, unreported and unregulated.
In closing, I invite you to review our revitalizing indigenous law for land, air and water project to learn more about the legal traditions of the people of the lower Fraser as they apply to watershed management and fisheries governance.
I also invite you to partner on our lower Fraser centre of co-operation and collaboration, which we are developing. It will be a venue for all levels of government, stakeholders, NGOs, academia and industry to convene. Currently all of these parties operate in silos, and we believe a central complex is needed to address the salmon crisis and climate change and to improve management of the lower Fraser region and of salmon in general.
Thank you for your time. Hoy chexw Siyam.