Madam Speaker, Dr. Rosenberg went on to say:
You can't fix this problem one fishery at a time, because the boats just move around; the effort simply shifts to somewhere else and makes the problems worse.
At the same convention of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, Charles Birkeland, a fisheries researcher at the University of Hawaii was quoted as saying:
For most of human history, fish and other marine species had naturally protected areas; places too remote, too deep or too dangerous to fish, but technology is ensuring there are no havens.
We are pushing fisheries off the edge of viability, and species to the edge of extinction.
In my estimate these are very revealing and important observations. They indicate to us that the scientific community has been giving signals to the political sector at many levels and in many instances. The debate today is part of a continuum that started decades ago.
My third point has to do briefly with an item that has already been touched upon by many who have spoken here tonight. There have been major federal initiatives in the fishing industry in the past decade. In 1990 there was the Atlantic fisheries adjustment program, AFAP. In 1992 there was the northern cod adjustment and recovery program, NCARP. Shortly after there was the Atlantic groundfish adjustment program, AGAP. After that there was another program which has been mentioned here tonight; the TAGS program was introduced in May 1994 and was a five year comprehensive program. In June 1998 there was the fishery restructuring and adjustment measures for the Atlantic groundfish industry, also known as the Canadian fisheries adjustment and restructuring plan, amounting to $730 million.
I agree with my colleagues who spoke earlier about the outcome of these particular investments. There seems to be a short term capacity to make plans but not a long term capacity to develop a coherent system of policies whereby the problem is tackled for the long term in a manner that would give desirable results.
I am not so sure whether my comment is fair because it is natural that governments want to be re-elected. The term at the most is five years. Governments by nature politically tend to make decisions from one term to the next. This may explain why we have this series of programs every three or four years. It is probably why we are having this debate today. We have been told there will be an election this year in the province of Newfoundland. Political pressures come and go and do not contribute much to a coherent discussion of the problem at hand. Everyone agrees that the fisheries does not lend itself to short term solutions. There is no doubt about that.
My fourth point is, this being a typical, classical issue of sustainable development, one has to examine it in terms of the long term and in terms of a capital, being the fishery, that can be exploited only to the extent at which it can produce interest. The harvest is the interest. When more fish are caught than the capacity of the resource to produce, namely more than the interest, then the capital is attacked, the resource is eroded and gradually it is whittled away.
This is what is evidently happening with an increasing global population which is now supposed to go from six billion to nine billion in the next four years. Obviously the pressure on this resource becomes stronger and stronger. The technology of the fleet is skyrocketing. The capacity of governments to regulate the catch is not there yet evidently. We have not ratified the law of the sea which will be my next point.
There is a convergence of negative factors which makes the management of this issue particularly difficult. This brings me to my fifth point which is the ecological approach to fisheries management.
A very thoughtful study was produced by the Conservation Council of New Brunswick a couple of years ago. It is authored by Janice Harvey and David Coon. They examined fisheries management and proposed an approach that would be a departure from the present one, which is a fisheries management that relies on numbers for targeted species and can often lead to a wrong conclusion and wrong recommendations.
I will quote briefly the main guideline for this particular approach as put forward by resource economist James Wilson together with biologist Lloyd Dickie. They describe an ecological management approach to fisheries.
[An] ecological management approach puts emphasis on the relationship between management rules and the parameters that control the level of production of the system. In “assessments” of fisheries, the parameters of a system are generally those factors that are considered as constants. They are the basic fertility of the system, the competitors, predators and prey resources in the fish community, and the physical environment in which it operates. If the parameters change, the whole dynamic system has to be reinterpreted.
There is a lot of truth in that observation. It is not something that can be examined in this context in this chamber tonight. However, it is an observation that we should take seriously, together with that of wildlife biologists Reed Noss and Allen Cooperrider who said the following about natural resource management:
Management is positive if it serves to protect biodiversity from harm or helps restore an ecosystem previously damaged. It is neutral if it essentially mimics or substitutes for natural disturbance-recovery processes (a theoretical possibility, though not yet convincingly demonstrated anywhere). But management is negative if it contributes directly or indirectly to biotic impoverishment. A proper philosophy for management.
What we are facing here obviously is a biotic impoverishment in very compressed and condensed terms. It seems to me that the crisis in the fishery which has been with us for some time, requires a new approach. It might be possible that the ecological approach proposed by the New Brunswick Conservation Council is one that should be given attention.
Let me make a brief pitch for Canada's ratification of the law of the sea. If we were to ratify the law of the sea, article 61(2) of the convention would help us considerably in being active in the protection of our resources in the exclusive international economic zone out there which has been the object of some heated debate here tonight as well.