Fisheries Committee on Feb. 13th, 2024

[Rick Perkins, Conservative, South Shore—St. Margarets, NS]

I'll take that as a yes. Colleagues around the cabinet table refused to give more resources to DFO to do it, so unfortunately your hands are tied with very limited resources.

Can you tell me how many enforcement officers have been added to DFO in the last eight years?

[Annette Gibbons]

There have been some added, but I don't know the exact number.

Does anyone have the exact number for the last eight years?

[Brent Napier]

Eight years, no...but over the last two or three we've had a number of troops graduate, which is between 60 and 90 officers, who've been added to the mix. We would have to give you a written response for the rest.

[Rick Perkins, Conservative, South Shore—St. Margarets, NS]

Could you? God bless all of the 60 to 90 for doing that and taking it on.

The incredible thing is that DFO has added 443 people to HR, putting HR over 800 people in that time. They have over 1,200 people now in corporate services, finance and administration, a huge growth in the bureaucracy in Ottawa.

Meanwhile, in regard to the great focus on enforcement, enforcement is key to any sustainable fishery and without it you cannot have a sustainable fishery. The priority of the department minister, under the six ministers and now your leadership, is to put it on administration and not on enforcement. Why?

[Annette Gibbons]

We have had a tremendous growth in the size of—

[Rick Perkins, Conservative, South Shore—St. Margarets, NS]

The department...that's for sure.

[Annette Gibbons]

—staff in the department in the last eight years. As is typical when you're increasing your various functions—

[Rick Perkins, Conservative, South Shore—St. Margarets, NS]

You've grown from 10,000 to 15,000—

[The Chair, Liberal, Ken McDonald]

I'm sorry. I'm going to interrupt.

Mr. Perkins, you've gone well over your time frame. I tried to allow an answer, but you kept asking questions.

I'll now go to Mr. Hardie for five minutes or less, please.

[Mike Kelloway, Liberal, Cape Breton—Canso, NS]

That would be Mr. Kelloway if that's okay.

In terms of traceability, I look at this whole situation like a tire, and then you have the spokes. The spokes are the solutions or the remedies or the things we want to put in place to prevent illegal actors from harvesting and exporting. Traceability was brought up today—that's one.

In the last round of questioning I got in my Maine question, but I think this is an opportunity.

Let's take a look at Maine. What have they done in terms of traceability, but what are the other things that make up their plan of attack in terms of enforcement and in terms of focusing on collaboration with indigenous people? Also, what is their overall plan to negate what is happening in Nova Scotia and New Brunswick? What could we learn from them, and are we actually focused on that as a best practice?

[Annette Gibbons]

I'll start and then turn it to Doug.

Maine has really taken the time to develop controls all along the supply chain so that there wouldn't be leakage and the ability to do this sort of laundering that we've talked a lot about today.

Maine also has a very robust traceability system. Basically people have a card that they need to swipe when they are registering legal product, so there is this constant tallying up of legally caught catch. As I mentioned earlier, there is this sort of integration between the regulations that provide the controls all along the supply chain, with the very robust traceability system to track everything happening along the supply chain. It's the key to Maine's—

[Mike Kelloway, Liberal, Cape Breton—Canso, NS]

Can I interject just for one second> Then I think you're going to go to Mr. Wentzell and I want you to do that.

My understanding—and tell me if I'm wrong—is that there was a period of time where Maine put a pause on their elver fishery to ensure that there wasn't just one solution but a suite of solutions. It wasn't just a guinea pig and let's see what happens this year, but was to effectively get it right for the licence-holders, for the first nations and for the communities that reside in the areas where the elver fishery takes place.

Can you talk about that for a second?

[Annette Gibbons]

That's right.

Go ahead, Doug.

[Doug Wentzell]

Thanks for the question.

Yes, we've been working closely with the State of Maine, and our fisheries management team has built our approach off theirs, in terms of the regulatory measures and the work towards a traceability system. The member is absolutely right—Maine has had a number of different closures of their fishery over the years, and it's taken them about six years to develop what they have right now. We do have some added complexity from a Canadian context in terms of the size of the fishery, in terms of indigenous consultation and in terms of different jurisdictions.

The State of Maine manages the harvest, the buying and selling, all of those elements, so we do have a few added components that we need to work through. However, we're certainly not reinventing the wheel. We've been able to learn a lot from the State of Maine, and we're very grateful for that.

[Mike Kelloway, Liberal, Cape Breton—Canso, NS]

Excellent.

I want to pivot for a second. MP Barron brought this up in an earlier question. Do we have any quantifiable data on the impact of all of this illegal fishing of elver? Do we have any sense of the stock? Obviously, common sense would be that the impact to the stock is really serious, but that's my assumption. That's my opinion.

Do we have any data on the impact of what's been happening over the last four years in terms of that stock?

[Doug Wentzell]

Again, thanks for the question. We do monitor elver returns in one of the key rivers in East River, Nova Scotia. That's our key indicator to make sure that the stock continues to be somewhat stable. We have seen continued elver abundance at a similar level in terms of returns, so that's encouraging. What we're not seeing are those returns translating into large eel abundance, and we need the large eels to return to the Sargasso Sea to complete that life cycle.

All that to say, managing removals from the fishery continues to be an important factor in terms of conservation. That's why for unreported catch, unauthorized catch, some of the numbers that we've seen in different years that have basically resulted in the closures that we've seen, part of those drivers have been around the conservation concerns in terms of removals from the fishery.

[The Chair, Liberal, Ken McDonald]

Thank you, Mr. Kelloway.

We'll now go to Madame Desbiens for two and a half minutes or less, please.

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

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

I'm wondering about the future of fisheries in general. In Quebec, in particular, we're having a good slap in the face, as we say back home. We're closing a fishery because it's too illegal: that's the gist of the situation. They've closed the mackerel fishery, they're almost closing the shrimp fishery, and the redfish compensation isn't enough. We're wondering whether redfish will survive in the long and medium term. At the moment, a whole range of problems means that we're three shakes away from saying that we're in the middle of a fisheries crisis. Faced with this prospect, the fishers who are listening to us don't have any alternative solution, and they don't have many anchor points to bounce back on the business front. Indeed, these people are in business, they earn their living, and there are villages that depend on that.

The elver case is a bit of a special case, where there's a lot of intimidation and “dark” markets. How do we prioritize the survival of the fishing economy when we look at this picture? What makes it urgent to act? Is it the need to protect the resource? Is it the need to keep fishers in place and preserve an economy that contributes to the country's GDP? What should the priority be? Is it people's safety? I put myself in your shoes and wonder where you stand.

[Annette Gibbons]

We're extremely aware of the importance of fisheries to coastal communities, make no mistake. We know very well that the fishery is paramount to the economy of these regions. That's why, in our policy frameworks and fisheries legislation, we take into account the socio-economic impacts of fisheries in everything we do.

There's no doubt that there's a lot of pressure on species and stocks. This is due, in part, to climate change. There's a lot of talk about it these days, particularly among fishers. In general, there are other pressures too. We try to mitigate them in all the policies and measures we adopt, including the owner-operator policy, which aims to ensure that benefits are shared in communities.

The redfish decision did include a section to support shrimp fishermen, who are going through a very difficult time. In each of our decisions and more global policies, we think about the impact on communities and their fishers. We try to do what we can through our decisions.

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

Are we in the process of—

[The Chair, Liberal, Ken McDonald]

I'm sorry, Madame Desbiens. You're done. You had a two-minute question and a two-minute answer. That's a good way to stretch out a two-and-a-half-minute question period.

We'll now go to Ms. Barron for two and a half minutes or less, please.

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

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Perhaps, Ms. Gibbons, I could get you to answer my previous question around the learnings from the 2019 conflicts around the lobster fishery.

Naiomi Metallic is an associate professor and chancellor's chair of aboriginal law and policy at Dalhousie University. She was here recently speaking to us in relation to the illegal, unregulated and unreported fishing, which, of course, is completely interconnected with what we are talking about today.

In some of the testimony that she provided, she shared the concern that some of the discussions have been one-sided, often equating indigenous fishing with illegal, unreported and unregulated fishing. She pointed out that:

This entirely overlooks that we are talking about constitutionally protected rights that require respect and implementation by governments, especially so given Canada's passing of the act on the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.

I'm wondering if you can provide some comments and thoughts around that. I'm happy to get further written information as well after the fact.

[Annette Gibbons]

There are certainly a lot of learnings that come out of really difficult situations like that.

Doug was managing our region during the height of a very tense period and may add some important observations. They were managing in the moment and figuring out how to diffuse the tensions, but I think that, over the longer term, we focused on a few things.

The most important one is understanding what indigenous communities are looking for in terms of access to the fishery and finding ways to support that. We have done a fair bit of movement on moderate livelihood through rights and reconciliation agreements in the last few years and also through these moderate livelihood fishing plans, which are not formal agreements but are understandings and kind of set out a vision for the community in terms of how they would like to be involved in the fishery and for the department in finding a way to support them to move toward those objectives. That's a really important piece.

We recognize that there's great interest and that there may be impacts on non-indigenous communities when changes are made in terms of indigenous participation. We have frequent dialogues, and we've recognized that we have to be open about what we are doing and why we're doing it and take the time for those conversations.

I will say that, in my own exchanges with fish harvester associations in moderate livelihood regions, if you will—and this can play across the country on reconciliation more generally—my observation is that people really do want to try to find a way to reconcile and to provide more realization of the objectives of indigenous communities. There is genuine support for that. There may be differences in approach and phasing and those sorts of things, but there is that support.

I often meet with the leadership of fish harvester associations, and they show a genuine willingness to find solutions and work with their members to be able to bridge some of those divides.

I think what I would say is that everyone realizes that these are groups that are living side by side and fishing side by side. They're working together on wharves, and they really want to try to work together in harmony. They have many success stories that they will share on both sides, and that's very encouraging to hear.

We have to keep at that. We have to keep those dialogues going, and we have to do it in a way that's respectful of both groups.

[The Chair, Liberal, Ken McDonald]

Thank you, Ms. Barron.

You outdid Madame Desbiens that time.

We'll now go to Mr. Small for five minutes or less, please.

[Clifford Small, Conservative, Coast of Bays—Central—Notre Dame, NL]

Thank you, Mr. Chair. My question is for Ms. Gibbons.

Is it not the role of your department and your minister to protect the livelihoods of harvesters and to protect the economic output of the fishing industry? Isn't that one of your big roles?