Fisheries Committee on Oct. 28th, 2025

[The Chair, Liberal, Patrick Weiler]

I call this meeting to order.

I would like to welcome you to meeting number nine of the Standing Committee on Fisheries and Oceans.

I want to start by acknowledging that we are gathered on the ancestral and unceded territory of the Algonquin Anishinabe people and by expressing gratitude that we are able to do the important work of this committee on lands they've stewarded since time immemorial.

Pursuant to Standing Order 108(2) , the committee is meeting to continue its study on the review of the Fisheries Act.

Today’s meeting is being held in a hybrid format, in accordance with the Standing Orders. Members may participate in person or via the Zoom application.

Before we continue, I would like to ask all in-person participants to consult the guidelines written on the cards on the table. These measures are in place to help prevent audio and feedback incidents, and to protect the health and safety of all participants, particularly the interpreters. You will also notice a QR code on the card with links to a short awareness video.

Pursuant to our routine motions, I would like to advise committee members that all witnesses appearing virtually in the first panel today have successfully conducted the required technical testing. We did have an issue with a witness in the second panel. We are going to reinvite this witness because we're unable to make sure that the sound check was approved, but we do want to make sure that we have this witness appear at another time.

I would like to make a few comments for the benefit of the witnesses and members.

Please wait until I recognize you by name before speaking. For those participating by video conference, click on the microphone icon to activate your mic and please mute yourself when you are not speaking.

With regard to interpretation, participants using the Zoom application can choose between the floor and English or French at the bottom of their screen. Participants in the room can use their headsets and select the desired channel.

I would remind you that all comments should be addressed through the chair.

Members in the chamber must raise their hands if they wish to speak. Those participating via Zoom must use the “raise hand” function. The clerk and I will do our best to maintain the order of speaking. We thank members in advance for their patience.

Before going to the witnesses, Mr. Arnold has raised his hand.

[Mel Arnold, Conservative, Kamloops—Shuswap—Central Rockies, BC]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Because of the late start due to the votes, will we be able to extend committee time for another 15 minutes?

[The Chair, Liberal, Patrick Weiler]

That's the plan. We started at 3:43 and we'll continue to 5:43. I just want to flag that for everybody now to make sure you can plan accordingly for that.

Mr. Gunn.

[Aaron Gunn, Conservative, North Island—Powell River, BC]

Thank you, Chair.

Just clarifying, did you say someone wasn't able to attend by video conference? I was just wondering who that was.

[The Chair, Liberal, Patrick Weiler]

This is Christina Burridge, executive director for the BC Seafood Alliance. The issue was that the witness had an older microphone that was approved from a while back. For whatever reason, it wouldn't work with Zoom.

We do want to make sure that we have this witness come appear, but because of interpretation we need to make sure that she passes the sound check.

With that, I'd like to welcome our witnesses.

Joining us by video conference, we have Morley Knight, fisheries management consultant.

Also joining us by video conference, we have Nico Prins, executive director, BC Shellfish Growers Association.

In person, we have Deborah Carlson, staff lawyer with West Coast Environmental Law Association.

We're going to start with the opening statements of the witnesses for five minutes or less, starting with Morley Knight.

Morley, the floor is over to you.

[Morley Knight, Fisheries Management Consultant, As an Individual]

Thank you very much.

As the chair said, my name is Morley Knight, and I currently work as a fisheries management consultant.

Thank you for the opportunity to appear before your committee and contribute to your study reviewing the Fisheries Act.

I worked with DFO for 37 years, mostly in the area of conservation and protection, with the responsibility of applying the Fisheries Act. This was first as a fishery officer, then as a supervisor and manager, and eventually as director of conservation and protection for the Newfoundland and Labrador region. Later I worked as a senior executive in fisheries management in St. John's and Ottawa, then as regional director general in the gulf and Maritimes region. I have lots of experience with the Fisheries Act and applying it.

Since leaving DFO, I have worked as a fisheries management consultant and continue to monitor how the Fisheries Act is used. Over the years, there have been multiple attempts to revise the Fisheries Act to improve it and how it is used to manage fisheries in Canada. I have observed many criticisms of the act and perceived weaknesses of it, yet during the discussions with the public and interested stakeholders about how the act should be revised, there has been little consensus over the years and much debate about the discretionary powers of the minister as outlined in the act.

It is my observation that the length of the Fisheries Act has grown significantly over my time in working with it, yet the fundamentals of the act have not significantly changed. As an example, the provisions of section 43(1) about making regulations have grown tremendously in length and detail yet, for the most part, what the minister needs to do and has the power to do is covered more than adequately in paragraphs 43(1)(a) and (b) that provide the minister with the power to make regulations governing the proper management and control of fisheries and the conservation and protection of fish. In many cases, the act is now filled with details that should be covered by a set of regulations made pursuant to the act.

The final section of the act now provides for a review of the provisions and operation of the act by your committee every five years. I believe that, in order to do this, your committee should ask the Department of Fisheries and Oceans for a report on the use, application, compliance with and enforcement of the provisions of the act, particularly those new provisions implemented in 2019.

I believe that only the department would have the necessary analysis and data to be able to provide you with the information that will allow you to conduct a review. Perhaps you already have this information and, if so, perhaps it could be circulated to stakeholders and witnesses who may be able to provide comments on the information that would be helpful for your review.

Unless your review demonstrates that there are compelling reasons to revise the Fisheries Act, I do not recommend that the act be reopened for revisions at this time. To begin with, there has not been adequate time, application of or assessment to consider if the revisions as implemented in 2019 are effective or not.

Any time the act has been opened for revisions, it has consumed an enormous amount of time and energy without coming to any clear consensus. Given the newness of the current provisions and the global turmoil now facing the fishery and the country, I do not think that it is an appropriate time to open up the Fisheries Act for review and debate.

If the act is going to be revised, I have two suggestions for change. One, revise section 7 regarding the issuance of licences to outline that the minister shall issue licences to indigenous communities for FSC purposes as the first right of access after the conservation needs of the stock are met. Since the Sparrow decision in 1992, this is no longer at the discretion of the minister.

Two, revise the act to indicate that the minister shall consider adjacency when issuing licences or allocations. While this has been a priority allocation principle of DFO policy for decades, it has not been consistently applied. The best case example of this is along the coast of Labrador, where local licence holders have less than half of the total value of fish in the region.

Thank you for the opportunity to present to you today. I look forward to your questions.

[The Chair, Liberal, Patrick Weiler]

Thank you very much, Mr. Morley.

Next we'll move on to Mr. Prins for five minutes or less.

[Nico Prins, Executive Director, BC Shellfish Growers Association]

Thank you, Mr. Chair and members of the committee.

My name is Nico Prins, and I'm the executive director of the BC Shellfish Growers Association, representing hundreds of small and medium-sized shellfish farms on the B.C. coast.

Shellfish aquaculture is one of the Canada's most sustainable food systems. Our farmers grow oysters, clams, mussels and scallops that clean the water, support rural and indigenous economies, and provide low-carbon protein.

However, the laws that govern us were never designed for aquaculture. The Fisheries Act, written to manage wild harvests, has become the default framework for farming, and unfortunately, it doesn't fit. This legislative gap causes confusion, inconsistency and unnecessary economic harm.

First, Canada needs to clearly define “aquaculture” in the Fisheries Act. Right now, the act doesn't actually say what aquaculture is, which means that we are treated as a fishery in one context, as a pollution source in another and as a farming activity in none. Defining aquaculture as the cultivation of aquatic plants and animals for food would provide a foundation for modern fit-for-purpose regulation. It would recognize aquaculture as what it is: a form of farming, not fishing.

Second, Canada needs to clarify how the precautionary principle is applied. Shellfish farmers fully support precaution when there is credible evidence of environmental or public health risk, but too often, precaution is used as a default when evidence is absent, resulting in blanket closures or restrictions without scientific justification.

In British Columbia, this has meant recurring harvest closures under the Canadian shellfish sanitation program or broad infrastructure limits under the Fisheries Act, even when data doesn't show harm. Precaution should be a disciplined decision-making tool, not a substitute for evidence. The act should make that clear. Precaution must be applied transparently, proportionately and with the goal of improving science, not avoiding it.

If we can define “aquaculture” properly and apply precaution responsibly, we can move from regulatory paralysis to science-based progress, protecting the environment while allowing sustainable food production to thrive.

Shellfish farmers are stewards of the ocean. We depend on clean water and healthy ecosystems. What we need from Parliament is a framework that treats us as partners in that stewardship, not as collateral within outdated legislation.

Thank you for this opportunity to speak.

I will be pleased to respond to questions.

[The Chair, Liberal, Patrick Weiler]

Thank you very much, Mr. Prins.

Last but not least, we'll go to Ms. Carlson.

[Deborah Carlson, Staff Lawyer, West Coast Environmental Law Association]

Thank you.

Good, sunny afternoon, Mr. Chair and committee members.

I'm Deborah Carlson, I'm a staff lawyer at West Coast Environmental Law. We're a not-for-profit public interest environmental law reform organization based in Vancouver, B.C., on the Coast Salish territories of the Squamish, Musqueam and Tsleil-Waututh nations. Thank you very much for the invitation to appear. I'm grateful to be here today, on the territory of the Algonquin Anishinabe people, to play a small part in this very important work you're doing here today and on other days.

My focus today is on the habitat protection provisions of the Fisheries Act. Across our country right now, I think it's fair to say, we're grappling with economic challenges that are not fully within our control, but in these times I put to you that it's more important than ever for us to take care of our own house and to do a good job managing the things that we do control. Healthy lands and waters are the foundations of well-being and resilience for communities across our country, including economic well-being and resilience. In this context, fish habitat protection remains a critical responsibility for the Department of Fisheries and Oceans.

In 2019, lawmakers amended the purpose of the Fisheries Act to emphasize the mandate for conservation and protection of fish habitat, but today, I'd like to draw your attention to a particular aspect of habitat protection mandated by the act, of which implementation has been less than satisfactory, in my view. In 2019, lawmakers added specific factors to section 34 that the minister must consider in relation to fish habitat protection, to make sure these were taken into account. One of these factors is cumulative effects. The minister must consider cumulative effects in decision-making and in making regulations.

I expect you're familiar with the issue of cumulative effects: essentially, many small impacts that add up and combine to produce large impacts. It's often called “death by a thousand cuts”, but today I want to give you another analogy that I think helps understand how this problem creeps up on us. Think of a small leak, maybe behind a wall, that goes on for a long time, unnoticed. Each drop isn't significant, but over time, quietly, the drops can add up to some massive damage. This, essentially, is the problem of cumulative effects in relation to fish habitat: They do accumulate in the same way—slowly—so they might not even be noticed until a critical threshold is passed.

Back in 2008, renowned expert Dr. Charles Minns tried to draw attention to the habitat losses associated with smaller projects, saying that, across the country, “The aggregate impact of many small projects likely matches the impact of the fewer large projects.”

DFO scientists and science advisory panels are certainly well aware of this problem and have done extensive analysis and research, yet despite the legal requirement that has been in the act since 2019, the only public evidence of DFO work to consider cumulative effects in law and policy is the 2025 position statement. This is about a subset of decision-making for authorizations for individual projects. It's hard to say how it is applied in practice, because it's based on how, decision by decision, you would actually consider cumulative effects. There's no reference point. When are the cumulative effects considered to be too great? However, there's a further missing piece with respect to the implementation. The minister is also directed to consider cumulative effects when making regulations. I see no evidence that this has been done and no framework for doing so.

There are also multiple studies by external researchers documenting that DFO policies and procedures related to such things as offsetting, self-assessment of risk by proponents and DFO letters of advice have had enough slippage in them—small impacts—to make significant contributions to cumulative effects.

In light of this somewhat unscrutinized and, I argue, unmanaged problem of critical effects related to the implementation of DFO regulations and policies, I suggest you make the following recommendations as part of your review. The two first are related. The first recommendation is that DFO be asked to develop a tool to assess and manage the risk of cumulative effects harmful to fish habitat associated with new or updated regulations, with transparent reporting. The second recommendation is to do the same thing with respect to DFO policies and procedures governing authorizations and other directions to project proponents. Finally, the third recommendation is that DFO be asked to report back to the committee, within one year, on its progress in implementing these first two recommendations. These are steps towards fulfilling the legal direction provided by the act and getting DFO on a path to understanding and managing the cumulative effects associated with its own regulations and policies.

Thank you.

[The Chair, Liberal, Patrick Weiler]

Thank you very much, Ms. Carlson.

That takes us through the end of the opening remarks. We're going to go into the first round of questioning, but right before that, I want to mention that, for our witness for the next panel, Ms. Burridge, we seem to have figured out the audio, so we're going to try to move ahead with that.

With that, we move into the six-minute round of questioning, starting with Mr. Small.

[Clifford Small, Conservative, Central Newfoundland, NL]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

My first question is for Mr. Knight.

Oceana, Oceans North and several other ENGOs, many of which attained considerable funding from foreign sources, want section 6.1(1) of the act modified. Essentially it's a modification of the precautionary approach, so that stocks can only be fished in a healthy zone.

Mr. Knight, do you agree with this?

[Morley Knight]

Thank you for the question, Mr. Small. I think it's a really good question.

As I've already alluded to, in my opinion, the act is probably already overly prescriptive. A number of the recent amendments over the past seven years and before that have sought to prescribe what the minister can do. I believe that the minister's obligation is to have proper management and control of the fishery, and conservation and protection of the fish. I might add that probably should include the conservation and protection of fish and fish habitat.

I really don't think there is any need to make it prescriptive to say the minister “must” do this and “must” do something else.

With regard to the actual issue of fishing and having to have the fishery in the safe zone, there is a whole lot of subjectivity in what is in the safe zone. That depends on science. Sometimes that depends on the validity and efficiency of the trawl surveys and on many other factors, so I don't think it's a really good idea to close the fishery whenever science says that the fishery is not in the safe zone.

I also would point out that fishing at very low levels when the fish are sometimes below the safe zone provides a lot of information about what is actually happening in the stock. It provides science with valuable knowledge that can be used to help assess the stock on a go-forward basis.

[Clifford Small, Conservative, Central Newfoundland, NL]

Mr. Knight, you mentioned earlier that, in your opinion, this is not a good time to reopen the act due to the economic and current trade environment and whatnot.

Would you like to elaborate on that?

[Morley Knight]

Sure. When I said it was not a good time to reopen the act, I was drawing on my experiences going back to the early nineties when consideration was given to amending the Fisheries Act or building in new provisions. What I can tell you is that the amount of energy, time and effort that goes into that from all sectors right across the country is really astronomical and difficult to describe. What happens when the Fisheries Act gets consideration for being reopened, while everyone has some ideas, like I do, of how it could be improved, there is no consensus on that.

I really think that what we've done now is made the act very thick. It's now more than 100 pages. We have the elements in there that we need. It's a matter of how the department can use the elements that are there to effectively manage the fishery, manage the resource and protect the fish and the environment they live in. I think all the tools are there. Could they be improved? Yes, they could be, but I really don't think it's a valuable use of people's time at this time.

As I also pointed out, I really think we need more assessment and application of the provisions that were put there in 2019 before we reopen it and start all over again with another set of changes when we really haven't assessed the impact of the changes that were last made in 2019.

[Clifford Small, Conservative, Central Newfoundland, NL]

Mr. Knight, should the Marshall decision be incorporated into the act if the act is reopened?

[Morley Knight]

That's a bit of a difficult question.

Personally, I don't think it should. I think the Marshall decision is a treaty decision that in many ways supersedes the act. The Fisheries Act should be the tool to effectively implement those decisions.

There are many provisions in the act now that govern the relationship between the minister and indigenous communities. That will, in my estimation, never cover all the various treaties that are in place across Canada or the ones that we'll make in the future.

Could the act be reframed to address certain elements of indigenous access to fisheries for a moderate livelihood or commercial access? Perhaps, but it's not evident to me how we could improve the act by trying to build each treaty into the act.

[Clifford Small, Conservative, Central Newfoundland, NL]

Thank you.

Ms. Carlson, have you heard of the “Open Standards for the Practice of Conservation”, more commonly known as the conservation standards?

[Deborah Carlson]

Yes, I have.

[Clifford Small, Conservative, Central Newfoundland, NL]

In your work in trying to create more marine parks, do you lean on the open standards to help guide you?

[The Chair, Liberal, Patrick Weiler]

We're over time, so if you can provide just a short answer, that would be nice.

[Deborah Carlson]

Thanks.

To be honest, this is more the work of my marine team colleagues at the West Coast Environmental Law Association. It would probably be better to ask one of them, but we're happy to provide something as a follow-up in writing.

[The Chair, Liberal, Patrick Weiler]

Thank you very much.

You have the floor for six minutes.

[Ernie Klassen, Liberal, South Surrey—White Rock, BC]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Thanks to all the witnesses for appearing here today.

Mr. Knight, how do you think we can improve the act? I felt you were implying that the previous improvements to the act were not being enacted. What suggestions would you have for improving the act at this point?

[Morley Knight]

On whether they're being enacted or not, I would say that in some cases the provisions put in place in 2019 have been enacted in some ways, but I don't think we've had enough experience with those provisions.

In addition to not having enough experience, we don't have the knowledge and information from the department or their assessment of how they've effectively implemented the new regulations for the inshore fishery, for example.

How could we improve the act in the future? My personal view is that if we were going to have a look at the act in the future, we'd look at cleaning it up, getting it back to basics and moving a fair bit of the detail that's in there that has created a whole lot of pages in the act into a set of pertinent regulations.

As one of the other witnesses today expressed, some of the habitat provisions in there now are very lengthy and very complex. If they're in the act, they're very hard to change and they may not be doing exactly what needs to be done.

In my personal opinion, in dealing with it for 40 years now and as a departmental employee for 37 years, I think the act needs to stick to the basics and the regulations should be used for the actual application and the details. I would simplify it and make it a lot shorter than it is now.