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37th PARLIAMENT, 1st SESSION

Standing Committee on Fisheries and Oceans

EVIDENCE

CONTENTS

0830

The Chair (Mr. Wayne Easter (Malpeque, Lib.))

0835

Mr. Alastair O'Rielly (President, Fisheries Association of Newfoundland and Labrador)

0840

0845

0850

The Chair

0855

Mr. Burton

Mr. Alastair O'Rielly

Mr. Burton

Mr. Alastair O'Rielly

Mr. Burton

The Chair

Mr. Roy

Mr. Alastair O'Rielly

0900

The Chair

Mr. Cuzner

0905

Mr. Alastair O'Rielly

The Chair

Mr. Stoffer

Mr. Alastair O'Rielly

Mr. Stoffer

Mr. Alastair O'Rielly

0910

Mr. Stoffer

Mr. Alastair O'Rielly

Mr. Stoffer

The Chair

Mr. Tom Wappel (Scarborough Southwest, Lib.)

Mr. Alastair O'Rielly

Mr. Wappel

Mr. Alastair O'Rielly

Mr. Wappel

Mr. Alastair O'Rielly

Mr. Wappel

Mr. Alastair O'Rielly

Mr. Wappel

Mr. Alastair O'Rielly

Mr. Wappel

Mr. Alastair O'Rielly

Mr. Wappel

Mr. Alastair O'Rielly

0915

Mr. Wappel

Mr. Alastair O'Rielly

Mr. Wappel

Mr. Alastair O'Rielly

Mr. Wappel

Mr. Alastair O'Rielly

Mr. Wappel

Mr. Alastair O'Rielly

Mr. Wappel

The Chair

Mr. Hearn

0920

Mr. Alastair O'Rielly

Mr. Loyola Hearn

Mr. Hearn

0925

Mr. Alastair O'Rielly

The Chair

Mr. Lunney

0930

The Chair

Mr. Alastair O'Rielly

The Chair

Mr. Lunney

0935

Mr. Alastair O'Rielly

The Chair

Mr. Roy

Mr. Alastair O'Rielly

The Chair

Mr. Alastair O'Rielly

The Chair

Mr. Alastair O'Rielly

The Chair

Mr. Roy

0940

Mr. Alastair O'Rielly

The Chair

Mr. Alastair O'Rielly

The Chair

Mr. Alastair O'Rielly

The Chair

0945

0950

Mr. Alastair O'Rielly

The Chair

0955

Mr. Earle McCurdy (President, Fish, Food and Allied Workers Union)

1000

1005

1010

The Chair

1015

Mr. Burton

Mr. Earle McCurdy

Mr. Burton

Mr. Earle McCurdy

The Chair

Mr. Roy

The Chair

1020

Mr. Earle McCurdy

The Chair

Mr. Roy

Mr. Matthews

Mr. Roy

Mr. Earle McCurdy

The Chair

Mr. Matthews

1025

Mr. Earle McCurdy

The Chair

Mr. Stoffer

Mr. Earle McCurdy

Mr. Ches Cribb (Vice-President, Deepsea Sector, Fish, Food and Allied Workers Union)

1030

The Chair

Mr. Earle McCurdy

1035

The Chair

Mr. Hearn

Mr. Earle McCurdy

1040

Mr. Loyola Hearn

Mr. Earle McCurdy

The Chair

Mr. Stoffer

Mr. Earle McCurdy

Mr. Stoffer

The Chair

Mr. Earle McCurdy

1045

The Chair

Mr. Stoffer

Mr. Earle McCurdy

The Chair

Mr. Earle McCurdy

The Chair

1055

Mr. Ray Andrews (Director, Industrial and Government Relations, Fishery Products International Limited)

1100

1105

1110

The Chair

Mr. Lunney

Mr. Ray Andrews

1115

Mr. Lunn

Mr. Ray Andrews

The Chair

Mr. Roy

The Chair

Mr. Ray Andrews

1120

The Chair

Mr. Roy

Mr. Ray Andrews

The Chair

Mr. Cuzner

Mr. Ray Andrews

The Chair

Mr. Ray Andrews

The Chair

1125

Mr. Ray Andrews

The Chair

Mr. Ray Andrews

The Chair

Mr. Wappel

The Chair

Mr. Stoffer

Mr. Ray Andrews

Mr. Stoffer

Mr. Ray Andrews

1130

Mr. Peter Stoffer

Mr. Ray Andrews

Mr. Stoffer

The Chair

Mr. Hearn

Mr. Ray Andrews

1135

Mr. Hearn

Mr. Ray Andrews

The Chair

Mr. Ray Andrews

The Chair

Mr. Ray Andrews

The Chair

1140

Mr. Ray Andrews

The Chair

Mr. Gus Etchegary (Spokesperson, Fisheries Crisis Alliance)

1145

1150

1155

The Chair

Mr. Gus Etchegary

1200

The Chair

Mr. Lunney

Mr. Gus Etchegary

1205

Mr. James Lunney

Mr. Gus Etchegary

1210

1215

The Chair

Mr. Roy

The Chair

Mr. Wappel

Mr. Gus Etchegary

Mr. Wappel

Mr. Gus Etchegary

The Chair

Mr. Wappel

1220

Mr. Gus Etchegary

Mr. Wappel

Mr. Gus Etchegary

Mr. Wappel

Mr. Gus Etchegary

1225

The Chair

Mr. Stoffer

Mr. Gus Etchegary

Mr. Stoffer

Mr. Gus Etchegary

1230

Mr. Stoffer

Mr. Gus Etchegary

The Chair

Mr. Hearn

Mr. Gus Etchegary

The Chair

1305

The Chair

1310

Mr. John Efford

1315

1320

1325

The Chair

Mr. John Efford

The Chair

Mr. John Efford

1330

The Chair

Mr. Andy Burton

Mr. John Efford

Mr. Andy Burton

Mr. John Efford

Mr. Andy Burton

The Chair

Mr. James Lunney

Mr. John Efford

1335

The Chair

Mr. John Efford

The Chair

Mr. Roy

Mr. John Efford

The Chair

Mr. Roy

Mr. John Efford

Mr. Roy

The Chair

Mr. John Efford

1340

The Chair

Mr. Stoffer

Mr. John Efford

Mr. Stoffer

Mr. John Efford

1345

The Chair

Mr. Hearn

The Chair

Mr. Hearn

The Chair

Mr. John Efford

1350

The Chair

Mr. John Efford

The Chair

Mr. Jack Harris (Leader, New Democratic Party of Newfoundland and Labrador)

1355

1400

1405

The Chair

Mr. Hearn

The Chair

Mr. Burton

Mr. Jack Harris

Mr. Burton

Mr. Jack Harris

The Chair

Mr. Roy

Mr. Jack Harris

The Chair

1410

Mr. Stoffer

Mr. Jack Harris

Mr. Stoffer

Mr. Jack Harris

The Chair

Mr. Peter Stoffer

Mr. Jack Harris

The Chair

Mr. Stoffer

Mr. Jack Harris

The Chair

Mr. Jack Harris

The Chair

Mr. Hearn

1415

Mr. Hearn

1420

Mr. Jack Harris

The Chair

Mr. Tony Hewitt (Mayor of Trepassey)

1425

The Chair

Mr. Wilfred Sutton (Concerned Citizen, Town of Trepassey)

1430

Mr. Tony Hewitt

1435

1440

The Chair

Mr. Burton

The Chair

Mr. Lunney

Mr. Tony Hewitt

Mr. Lunney

The Chair

Mr. Hearn

The Chair

Mr. Roy

1445

The Chair

Mr. Tony Hewitt

Mr. Wilfred Sutton

1450

1455

The Chair

Mr. Roy

Mr. Tony Hewitt

The Chair

Mr. Cuzner

Mr. Tony Hewitt

Mr. Cuzner

Mr. Tony Hewitt

Mr. Cuzner

Mr. Tony Hewitt

Mr. Cuzner

The Chair

Mr. Stoffer

1500

Mr. Tony Hewitt

Mr. Stoffer

Mr. Wilfred Sutton

Mr. Stoffer

Mr. Tony Hewitt

Mr. Stoffer

1505

The Chair

Mr. Hearn

Mr. Wilfred Sutton

1510

The Chair

Mr. Tony Hewitt

The Chair

Mr. Hearn

The Chair

Mr. Wilf Sutton

1515

The Chair

Mr. Stoffer

Mr. Wilfred Sutton

Mr. Stoffer

1525

The Chair

1530

Mr. Don Norman (Vice-President, Salmonid Association of Eastern Newfoundland)

1535

1540

The Chair

Mr. Lunn

Mr. Don Norman

Mr. Lunney

1545

Mr. Don Norman

Mr. Ken McLean (Chair, Fish Management Committee, Salmonid Association of Eastern Newfoundland)

The Chair

Mr. Don Norman

The Chair

Mr. Roy

Mr. Don Norman

1550

The Chair

Mr. Ken McLean

The Chair

Mr. Stoffer

Mr. Peter Stoffer

Mr. Don Norman

1555

The Chair

Mr. Stoffer

Mr. Don Norman

The Chair

Mr. Wappel

Mr. Don Norman

Mr. Wappel

Mr. Don Norman

1600

Mr. Ken McLean

Mr. Stoffer

Mr. Don Norman

Mr. Stoffer

Mr. Don Norman

Mr. Cuzner

Mr. Don Norman

Mr. Cuzner

1605

Mr. Don Norman

The Chair

Mr. Ken McLean

The Chair

Mr. Hearn

1610

Mr. Don Norman

Mr. Hearn

Mr. Don Norman

The Chair

Mr. Don Norman

The Chair

1615

Ms. Bernadette Dwyer (Chief Executive Officer, Fogo Island Co-Operative Society)

1620

1625

The Chair

Mr. Burton

1630

Ms. Bernadette Dwyer

The Chair

Mr. James Lunney

Ms. Bernadette Dwyer

Mr. James Lunney

Ms. Bernadette Dwyer

Mr. James Lunney

Ms. Bernadette Dwyer

Mr. James Lunney

Ms. Bernadette Dwyer

The Chair

Mr. Jean-Yves Roy

Ms. Bernadette Dwyer

1635

The Chair

Mr. Matthews

Ms. Bernadette Dwyer

Mr. Matthews

Ms. Bernadette Dwyer

Mr. Matthews

Ms. Bernadette Dwyer

Mr. Matthews

Ms. Bernadette Dwyer

Mr. Matthews

Ms. Bernadette Dwyer

Mr. Matthews

Ms. Bernadette Dwyer

Mr. Matthews

Ms. Bernadette Dwyer

Mr. Matthews

Ms. Bernadette Dwyer

Mr. Matthews

The Chair

Ms. Bernadette Dwyer

1640

1645

The Chair

Mr. Stoffer

Ms. Bernadette Dwyer

Mr. Stoffer

Ms. Bernadette Dwyer

The Chair

1650

Mr. Stoffer

Ms. Bernadette Dwyer

The Chair

Mr. Hearn

Ms. Bernadette Dwyer

1655

Mr. Hearn

Ms. Bernadette Dwyer

The Chair

1700

Mr. Carl Powell (Individual Presentation)

1705

1710

The Chair

Mr. Stoffer

Mr. Carl Powell

1715

1720

The Chair

Mr. Hearn

Mr. Carl Powell

The Chair

Mr. Burton

Mr. Carl Powell

The Chair

CANADA

Standing Committee on Fisheries and Oceans

NUMBER 044

1st SESSION

37th PARLIAMENT

EVIDENCE

[Recorded by Electronic Apparatus]

¾ (0830)

[English]

The Chair (Mr. Wayne Easter (Malpeque, Lib.)): Could we come to order, please, folks. We want to keep a fairly tight schedule today because we're going to have a couple of extra witnesses who aren't on the list. We would like to conclude by 4:30 p.m.

For the purpose of the record, first of all, we are in St. John's, Newfoundland, pursuant to Standing Order 108(2), to further our study of the implications of extending Canada's exclusive economic zone to include the nose and tail of the Grand Banks and the Flemish Cap.

I would like to welcome our first witness, Alastair O'Rielly, president of the Fisheries Association of Newfoundland and Labrador. I believe Alastair is just back from the Boston Seafood Show, where we were as well.

Welcome, Alastair, and thank you for coming at 8:30 on a Saturday morning. The floor is yours.

¾ (0835)

Mr. Alastair O'Rielly (President, Fisheries Association of Newfoundland and Labrador): Thank you, Mr. Chairman. It's a pleasure to be here.

Thank you, and I thank the committee for undertaking to visit Newfoundland and to participate in this activity, which is critical to our fishing industry.

I also greatly appreciate the fact you were in Boston, so you have an appreciation for the broader world within which our industry really lives in terms of the marketplace. Boston is always impressive; I'm sure you were impressed with what you saw as well. It's an environment that is awesome in terms of the competitive environment, but it's also very enlightening and encouraging in terms of the opportunity. I hope you found it to be of interest.

I'll rush through my presentation fairly quickly. I think you all have copies. The association I represent, FANL, represents primarily seafood processors. Some of our member firms have access to groundfish resources--some of the larger companies, such as Highliner Foods and Fishery Products International. All of our industry, of course, used to be built on groundfish. We've been around, as an organization, since 1944. We represent about 43 companies with about 60 processing plants and account for about 75% to 80% of the commercial production and marketing that takes place in the Newfoundland fishing industry.

I've been part of the NAFO delegation participating in this process for the past five years as president of FANL. I had previous exposure to FANL some time ago, in an earlier life, and we've been ongoing participants in the process.

My first comment to you is not on the subject of FANL, it's on the subject of the EU tariff issue. I want to thank you very much for the activity you engaged in last fall in looking at the shrimp tariff issue and the impact it has also on our groundfish resources. I attended a session with you; I believe it was in October in the fall of last year. It was my first opportunity to appear before your committee--I've previously participated with other committees--and I wasn't really sure what the outcome would be. I must say, I was really impressed with the report you prepared. It seemed to very well encapsulate the issue and the challenge, and I, like you, am looking forward to the response from the minister on that report.

NAFO is an activity we find to be extremely frustrating. We're now 25 years into this process, ten years after a moratorium on northern cod, and I think we have to be candid in saying that NAFO has failed to develop and implement an adequate conservation and resource management regime for waters outside the 200-mile limit.

NAFO's regime is extremely lax in many respects. It just doesn't have the forcefulness that is required in terms of conservation rules, and more importantly, the rules it does have are not well enforced. One of the most critical elements of NAFO, and one of the good things about it, is that it requires 100% observer coverage on all vessels. That's not a perfect system; there are flaws and there are things that need to be done to improve it, but it is extremely beneficial to us in terms of detection of the infringements that take place among various contracting parties to NAFO. While it doesn't really constitute a very effective deterrent, nor are there very effective deterrents in NAFO to foreign over-fishing activity, the detection side of the business works rather well in concert with Canada's surveillance activities, but most importantly, with the observer coverage.

One of the things we observe in terms of the impact of the collapse of groundfish resources is that in many respects the impacts have been muted, first by the benefits that were achieved through financial support to the industry and to the individuals and communities that were impacted. Various kinds of financial instruments were used--programs such as TAGS and NCARP and so on. That got us through the hurdle. But then the industry developed rapidly on shellfish, and crab resources skyrocketed, as did shrimp, and to some extent we've been lured into some false sense of security, I think, because of it.

I want to speak to the problem with NAFO in terms of its lax regime. This is just one of the many indications that have come in recent times of some of the problems with NAFO, and a trend line.

¾ (0840)

Prior to 1995 there was an average of 71 vessel-years. That would assume the vessel fished every day of the year, so it's just a benchmark. There is actually, of course, a much larger number of vessels. The estimated level of fishing activity was 26,000 fishing days, and each one of those days would represent the activity of a large factory vessel.

After 1995 we went down to 6,000 fishing days, or 16 vessel-years, for the first few years; by 2001 we were back up to 10,000 fishing days. The trend line is totally wrong. The gains that were achieved with the well-known turbot war of 1995 have been lost in large measure, and we're slipping.

In 2001 Canada, at the last NAFO meeting, revealed some of the observations of the level of infractions that have occurred in foreign overfishing activities. There has been illegal harvest of 10,000 tonnes of groundfish resources that are under moratoria: 3LNO plaice, 3NL cod, and 3NL redfish. In addition to that, the quotas that are there for turbot were exceeded by 3,100 tonnes. This is a huge volume of resources that is being extracted from stocks that are just in a recovery mode. That level of fishing activity clearly is going to preclude recovery if it's not arrested.

Just to put into context what the economic and social costs are of this kind of regime, if we were to have a proper conservation structure in place, such that we could rebuild offshore stocks back to what I would say would be very conservative levels, mid-1980s levels--this would be far lower than the fishing efforts that were achieved and carried out prior to that period of time, which are probably not sustainable, but thinking of the 1980s as being what we probably could appreciate or expect to see in terms of a proper conservation regime leading to sustainable utilization of these resources--based on some of the key stocks that are there, the ones I noted, we could realistically achieve for Canada 60,000 tonnes of groundfish resources just from those four stocks of offshore cod, plaice, redfish and yellowtail flounder. And 60,000 tonnes is enough to operate as many as six offshore groundfish plants effectively on a year-round basis.

This of course doesn't include what might happen with respect to other stocks, such as northern cod, which are also significantly impacted by this fishing activity. The benefits could be considerably greater than the amount I've indicated here.

To comment on the actions in NAFO since the 1995 turbot war, initially following that activity violations dropped from 25 citations a year to only one in 1995. We had 100% observer coverage. That effectively has helped us to monitor what has happened over this period of time.

This is expensive, however. The benefits that were achieved in 1995 cost us dearly. Our share of turbot resources, following the negotiations that took place pursuant to the Estai event, went from 60% of the turbot resource to 37%.

In terms of context, if we look at the current quota levels of turbot, which are now 44,000 tonnes under NAFO's resource management regime, that reduction alone would approximate about 10,000 tonnes. In effect, that's enough for another offshore groundfish plant operating year round--just the amount we had to negotiate in order to achieve the 100% observer coverage following the 1995 activities.

Turning to what it is we want, ultimately what we want is a comprehensive conservation-based fisheries management regime outside the 200-mile limit that's at least comparable to what we have within the 200-mile limit. I think that, simply stated, is what our objective has to be.

Our choices, in terms of pursuing that objective, are first to fix NAFO, which would entail developing the required regime within NAFO within some reasonable timeframe. The second option would be to implement custodial management of the resource, where Canada would take responsibility for full management, conducting the science and carrying out that work in the nose and tail of the Grand Banks. A third option would be to unilaterally extend jurisdiction beyond the 200-mile limit to the edge of the continental shelf, and perhaps beyond to include the Flemish Cap.

¾ (0845)

Turning to some specific comments on each one of these options, the approach needed to fix NAFO, if we were to pursue that choice, would be to inform other NAFO contracting parties of what we require, clearly delineating the kind of resource management regime we think is necessary and indicating the timeframe within which we are prepared to work with other NAFO contracting parties to achieve it.

To some extent, I think we've already begun that process this past year, in terms of revealing the level of violations and the level of overfishing that's taking place. This year we're facing a huge test in NAFO because the observer coverage is coming up for review. Our meeting is in Spain, so we anticipate a difficult meeting and one that's really going to test the mettle as to whether NAFO has any real prospects for continuance. Of course, if we can't achieve the kind of regime that's necessary within a reasonable timeframe, obviously we would have to consider leaving NAFO.

Another option is to pursue custodial management. Effectively, what we mean by that is that Canada would have to conduct the science, set the total allowable catches, and implement and administer a conservation-based regime including all monitoring and enforcement activity. The required resources for this would be significantly greater than DFO currently has access to.

Key principles, I think, in pursuing that choice would be to recognize that we would have to respect historic access and allocations. That would likely mean using the current NAFO allocation key as to how much each of the contracting parties achieves within the various quotas that exist around the nose and tail of the Grand Banks.

The second principle is that, in whatever conservation regime we would undertake to implement, we would have to commit, I believe, to impose no greater burden on countries fishing the nose and tail than we impose on ourselves within the zone. That would effectively put in place a comparable resource management regime for all the transboundary stocks to what we experience within the Canadian zone.

Under the third option, extended jurisdiction, we would actually take ownership and not just management of the resources outside the 200-mile limit. This would mean effectively removing all foreign fishing activities from the fishing zone. This type of unilateral action would in all likelihood receive no support outside Canada.

So a realistic approach to the problems we face, we believe, is to pursue extended jurisdiction. The most desirable choice, of course, is extended jurisdiction, but it's difficult if not impossible. Changing laws requires some measure of acceptance by those being governed, and unilateral action on extended jurisdiction would certainly receive no support internationally.

We therefore believe we have to make attempts to obtain change within NAFO--again, within some reasonable timeframe--and, if unsuccessful, then move to custodial management. That approach would mean we would have to develop allies for this kind of action, undertake a massive public relations campaign--within Canada, but primarily within the European Union--to expose the overfishing activities and to expose the requirement for taking this kind of action. We need to demonstrate through this process that we've given NAFO a full, fair, and reasonable chance to correct its shortcomings and deal with these problems.

So your committee's support on this is greatly appreciated and necessary. We think collectively and individually you can all help support the industry's cause in dealing with this very serious and very important issue, support the conduct of an appropriate and effective public relations campaign, take a stand on NAFO, enforce the issue within Parliament, and push government to provide the resources necessary within DFO and the Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade to take this action and of course, more than just resources, to create the will and environment to achieve it.

That concludes my comments. I'm ready for your questions.

¾ (0850)

The Chair: Thank you very much, Mr. O'Reilly, for a realistic presentation. Some of us were talking about custodial management last night and what the other options are. I think you've spelled out both the pros and cons in a realistic approach very well. Thank you very much.

We'll start questions with Mr. Burton.

¾ (0855)

Mr. Andy Burton (Skeena, Canadian Alliance): Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

Thank you for your presentations. I think you answered most of our questions, certainly from my point of view, before I got a chance to ask them.

But on the trend, from pre-1995 levels the fishing days went way down and are starting to creep up again. Is this just strictly a laissez-faire sort of attitude, that we've become a little bit lazy on this thing? Or why is it starting to increase again? Can you expand a little?

Mr. Alastair O'Rielly: NAFO is an extremely ineffective organization in terms of enforcing its members to be compliant with its own rules and regulations. What we saw in 1995 was truly extraordinary--for Canada to have taken the action it did against the Estai. This really brought, I think, a level of consciousness among various member countries of NAFO who realized we are just not going to take this kind of behaviour. That held for the first two or three or four years. But it has begun to erode rapidly, and there are no consequences thus far.

We are seeing an increased level of fishing activity every year. There are more vessels fishing and fishing for longer periods and catching more resources. And so far they're doing it with impunity. There are no consequences. We can only anticipate this action will continue unless we deal with this.

Mr. Andy Burton: Okay.

I have one quick one, Mr. Chairman, and then certainly I want to give as much time as we can to the members from the east coast.

We heard some pros and cons about the 100% observer situation yesterday. One of the cons is that even though they're on board, their reports are not necessarily accurate; they're really looking after their own interests. What's your take on that?

Mr. Alastair O'Rielly: As I indicated, I think there are things we need to fix with respect to the observer coverage. In some of the member countries the people who participate as observers, of course, are nationals, so one expects they have some bias. That's clearly a problem. There's also an issue as to whether they participate in the activities on board. They're not supposed to, but we're given to understand that in some of these countries we see evidence that the observers are actually engaged in the work of the fishing crew. And clearly there's a conflict there.

But for the most part and for most countries, the observer coverage is very effective at documenting what's taking place.

There are also issues of accuracy. I wouldn't want to suggest to you that I believe the observer coverage reports are 100% accurate, but I think they generally reflect the trend lines of what's taking place.

Mr. Andy Burton: Thank you.

The Chair: Thank you, Mr. Burton.

Monsieur Roy.

[Translation]

Mr. Jean-Yves Roy (Matapédia--Matane, BQ): Thank you, Mr. Chair.

You have just spoken about the Observer Program. One witness told us yesterday that, in any event, the observers who were aboard ships only answered to themselves. As a general rule, what was being provided as information was completely inaccurate and, in any event, the Observer Program, according to this witness, was totally ineffective and even almost useless. This is a comment, but you can add something later.

On the other hand, in your recommendations, you bring up the possibility of an information campaign. However, you haven't specified who would be responsible for it. Would it be the industry, the Department of Foreign Affairs, the Department of Fisheries and Oceans or had you considered the possibility of doing this jointly? Together, have you evaluated what this might represent as an investment by the government to support you in an information campaign? We are well aware that this could represent very significant costs, at the international level. I would like to know if you have evaluated that possibility.

I have a third question, if the Chair will allow me. It is a question/comment. NAFO has been in existence for 25 years. However, after 25 years, we are being told that it is completely ineffective, that it doesn't work. Some witnesses whom we heard yesterday are of the opinion that unilateral action should be undertaken immediately. I tend to think that, after 25 years, that we have thought about it enough. I think that if I had an organization and that it didn't work after 25 years... I would not have waited 25 years to leave it or, on the other hand, to try determinedly, by every means possible, to improve it.

I would like your comments on that.

[English]

Mr. Alastair O'Rielly: Thank you, Mr. Roy.

On the observer coverage, again I agree there are flaws and problems with it, but by and large I believe it works, and the evidence is there in the report that was tabled at Helsingør in January.

Effectively, all that information was derived through the observer program, and it hasn't been challenged as being inaccurate or incomplete with respect to responses of other NAFO contracting parties. I think it is beneficial, and if there are flaws in it, we need to fix the flaws rather than contemplate living without it.

I haven't contemplated how much it would cost to conduct the kind of public relations campaign that would be necessary here, but what we need to do on this issue is broaden our minds in terms of the approaches that are necessary beyond PR. You can spend huge gobs of money--billions, probably, if you wanted to do a media campaign--but that's not what would probably be necessary. I think what we need to do is find venues where we can influence people who have influence within the EU.

One of the problems we have is that most of the people who participate in the NAFO process have a fishing interest, and their objectives in participating in NAFO are to source fish. We have to go beyond those who are trying to source fish and speak to the communities themselves--to the citizens of the EU, in particular--and expose the level of overfishing and the non-compliance problems we see.

I believe if we can turn that tide, we will have effect. The cost of doing it and the consequences of undertaking to do it have to be borne by all of us. I think industry has a role to play, but primarily it has to be led by the Government of Canada in order to have the kind of currency--I don't mean financial, but the kind of political currency--necessary to have effect within the world community.

On the last point, I suppose there are many times when I personally have felt the kind of frustration that would lead you to say, well, that's enough of NAFO; we've been at this for close on 25 years and should just stop and count our losses and move on.

The problem with that is that NAFO is really the only recognized forum within the international community that the world sees as being a mechanism to conduct this kind of work. To make the case for moving forward to custodial management, we have to first demonstrate that NAFO cannot be fixed. I think we can do that in parallel. We have to, as I indicated, outline what the timeframe is, outline what our requirements are and what kind of a regime we want, and work towards that within the next two or three years--I'm not sure exactly what the right timeframe is--and at the same time, build a case internationally for custodial management approaches.

I think it's highly defensible if we separate resource access from resource management. That's really the key, because every time you look at an issue of access to resources, it really contaminates and almost obliterates any discussion about management. Access to the resources is of primary concern.

¿ (0900)

The Chair: Thank you, Mr. Roy. Thank you, Mr. O'Rielly.

Mr. Cuzner.

Mr. Rodger Cuzner (Bras d'Or--Cape Breton, Lib.): I really appreciate your presentation as well, Alastair. It's fairly pragmatic and realistic. Certainly through our discussions with DFAIT we recognize that any unilateral action has other, far-reaching repercussions as well. But the one I wanted to focus on--you touched on it briefly there--is the potential to explore allies.

I'll ask your opinion on who are the potential allies out there, who are the other players who are in a not dissimilar situation, maybe, with their offshores. What's in it for them to support us in trying to garner more control over this area? Maybe you could comment on that, on where the potential relationships might lie.

¿ (0905)

Mr. Alastair O'Rielly: Thank you, Mr. Cuzner.

I think the allies we need to develop are member countries of NAFO individually, and Canada has a good relationship with most of these countries on a number of fronts. Within NAFO we have clear differences of views, but I think what we have to do is speak to them.

One of the things we get from NAFO, and we need to recognize this, is that to some extent it has contained the activity among the member countries of NAFO. There are really no rogue fishing nations out there any more, so it is a group of countries that are sharing access to this resource.

Our problem, as I said, is that there's non-compliance. If we build a case for a proper conservation regime, I think we can bring these countries on side, perhaps through speaking directly to the populace. Also, there are a number of these countries that, because of their other relationships with Canada, would be willing to commit to a longer-term strategy to resolve the problems with NAFO if it meant that their access to the resource is not going to be jeopardized.

That's difficult, I think, for us to acknowledge and to accept. We'd all love to be able to make a plausible case for removing all foreign interests from the nose and tail of the Grand Banks and having that exclusively to ourselves, but I don't think that's realistic. So if we can get past that and acknowledge the historic fishing interests and rights of the other member countries, I think we'll be able to do this on a more bilateral basis.

The Chair: Thank you, Rodger.

Mr. Stoffer.

Mr. Peter Stoffer (Sackville--Musquodoboit Valley--Eastern Shore, NDP): Thank you, Mr. Chair, and thank you, Sir.

Sir, yesterday you had meetings with some NAFO and DFO folks here. Are you able to divulge any information about that meeting yesterday?

Mr. Alastair O'Rielly: No, I can't really, Mr. Stoffer. I can only say that the process we currently employ is that there are a number of people who participate in an advisory committee. Mostly it's the people who participate as the delegation who attend the NAFO meetings. We go through a series of meetings during the course of the year. This one, of course, comes fairly closely following the meeting at Helsingør. It's a post-mortem of what happened, of what went right, what went wrong, and what were the issues we saw arising from that. As the year unfolds, we lead towards what are our priorities, what are our strategies going into NAFO, and how do we try to make some progress.

The level of effort, actually, that we expend on this is quite significant in terms of meeting, and planning, and trying to reason through the process as to how we make some gains. I think that just adds to the frustration, because we don't accomplish anything close to what we think is necessary.

Mr. Peter Stoffer: Mr. Chair, as you know, I handed out a copy of the Canadian assessment of the compliance in the regulatory area from that meeting in January 2002. In there, in the details of the non-compliance, there was a summary. There were notes about increased catches of juvenile fish through small-mesh gear. About 80% of observer reports of shrimp activity have never been submitted. I'm questioning as to what are we waiting for in terms of....

This is happening now. We heard yesterday, Mr. Chair, in presentations from other people, that the rest of the world is more or less laughing at Canada and just doing whatever they want to do because we don't have the teeth or the will in order to put a stop to these infractions. With what we have here, and with those meetings you've attended, what can Canada do right now to stop these types of infractions? Right now.

Mr. Alastair O'Rielly: Under the rules of NAFO, very little. But one thing is we need to go beyond just indicating what the level of these infringements is. We have to start naming names. That's one of the things we didn't do at Helsingør. We didn't identify which countries are guilty of these infractions . This is known. In our view it ought to be divulged, and in this way we can more effectively embarrass and bring pressure to bear on the offending countries.

¿ (0910)

Mr. Peter Stoffer: Okay. Sir, when it comes to the extension of the nose and tail of the continental shelf, some people were asking whether it is an extension of the 200-mile limit for all of Canada or just that part. Are these areas on the continental shelf and the Flemish Cap all you're looking for in terms of custodial management if we go this route?

Mr. Alastair O'Rielly: Yes, that's the issue for us, the edge of the continental shelf and the Flemish Cap area. An argument may be made in terms of the north because we have some issues there, but the issue we're speaking to within NAFO is on the overfishing of the nose and tail of the bank. That is the zone at issue.

Mr. Peter Stoffer: Thank you.

The Chair: Thank you, Peter.

Mr. Wappel.

Mr. Tom Wappel (Scarborough Southwest, Lib.): Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

You were at the Helsingør meeting, right?

Mr. Alastair O'Rielly: Yes.

Mr. Tom Wappel: I'd like to get a little flavour of how NAFO works. As Mr. Stoffer said, this Canadian assessment was handed out. There are 13 slides, so I presume the Canadians had a slot, during which time they made their presentation. Am I correct?

Mr. Alastair O'Rielly: Yes.

Mr. Tom Wappel: And you said Canada didn't name names. Do you mean Canada didn't name names publicly, while the presentation was being made and problems were being identified? Did Canada name the countries during the meeting and it was just agreed among the NAFO members that it would be kept quiet publicly, or did they simply say that one contracting party had 655 fishing days without naming that contracting party?

Mr. Alastair O'Rielly: They did not name names.

Mr. Tom Wappel: What is the rationale for that kind of a presentation?

Mr. Alastair O'Rielly: This is really a key element of the problem we face here in terms of how assertive we need to be within the NAFO framework if we're going to give effect to it. The idea that Canada came forward to this extent and provided this kind of information is very extraordinary. It's the first occasion on which Canada has taken this kind of action. We should have gone further and named names.

I can't really speak for what the strategy might have been within DFAIT or DFO, but it is my perception that their intent was to at least bring forward the information first and then proceed to the issues of identifying offending countries and dealing with this either at a future meeting of NAFO or on a bilateral basis, with respect to the various countries.

Mr. Tom Wappel: You're a member of the delegation. Does that mean you're an observer? Or are you an integral part of developing the strategy?

Mr. Alastair O'Rielly: All of us who participate have an opportunity for input into this process. We can bring forward our views and state our case as to what we think is the correct course of action. But ultimately the decision, of course, rests with the DFO and DFAIT as to what strategy Canada is going to employ and what level of information is going to be provided.

Mr. Tom Wappel: Can I assume you recommended that names be named?

Mr. Alastair O'Rielly: Yes. Most of us in the industry feel that we should be more aggressive on this issue and divulge that information.

Mr. Tom Wappel: So your recommendation was rejected, clearly. Was there a rationale given by our negotiating team as to why your recommendation to name names was rejected?

Mr. Alastair O'Rielly: No. This didn't come into conflict. Our intent was to get this information on the table and in the process to make it public. This is a huge advance, as we see it, from an industry point of view. What we really need to do is ratchet it up. This is what we're trying to achieve through this process. Canada's approach on this in recent years has probably been far too conciliatory within NAFO, far too diplomatic. The fact that we have not prepared to divulge more information in the past speaks to this.

In fairness, a lot of the information compiled for and presented at Helsingør had only been made available in the past few years through some fairly intensive research on what information is to be contained in observer reports. There was a fairly significant level of effort needed to compile this information. Again, this speaks to problems with NAFO. Reports are incomplete and not timely. It takes a tremendous amount of effort to put something together that could withstand the kind of a test necessary if one were to make these allegations.

The process really began about a year ago. Seeing this kind of information compiled and presented was part of what the advisory group has been pushing for. And it was done. I wouldn't want to communicate or convey an impression that there has been conflict on this matter. We're pleased that it was finally presented. We will be more pleased when the names of the offending countries are finally divulged. We expect this to happen in due course.

¿ (0915)

Mr. Tom Wappel: All right.

I have just two more questions. This may be a naive question, I don't know. Has it ever been brought up or suggested that there be 100% observer status, but that the observers be from different countries than the fishing boats?

Mr. Alastair O'Rielly: That has been Canada's position within NAFO, but we have been unsuccessful at convincing the other member countries that this is the appropriate course of action.

Mr. Tom Wappel: Do you mean all the countries reject this idea?

Mr. Alastair O'Rielly: I don't remember the exact occasion when it was discussed and debated, but certainly the predominant view among NAFO countries is that they want their own nationals on board their own vessels.

In some countries the observers are independent contractors, as they are in Canada. In some cases they are public servants. In a number of cases it appears that they're individuals who are retained by the vessel owner. Of course those are the ones with whom we have the problems.

Mr. Tom Wappel: This is my last question, Mr. Chairman, if I may. After this Canadian assessment was made, could you describe for us the reaction of the other countries to our presentation?

Mr. Alastair O'Rielly: There was some initial shock. Some people were surprised at the information and reflected this. The process--

Mr. Tom Wappel: Were they surprised that we found out or surprised at the information?

Mr. Alastair O'Rielly: I would say they were registering surprise at the information. We have to recognize that this is part of the process.

This whole thing occurs over a week. It's in an international forum characterized by diplomacy and due process. People speak to these issues with great concern and sincerity, and express their reservations about these problems, and agree with us that it is outrageous and has to be dealt with effectively; but when it comes to presenting the measures necessary to achieve this, there's no support.

People are very effective at deflecting and deferring these kinds of things within the NAFO structure. Yet they sound as though they're serious and concerned. They speak to the issue with great empathy and so on, but it means nothing.

Mr. Tom Wappel: Thank you, Mr. Chair.

The Chair: This is one of the reasons there are problems with the United Nations, too.

Mr. Hearn.

Mr. Loyola Hearn (St. John's West, PC): Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman. Seeing as we're not going to be here tomorrow, we should say top o' the morning to everyone.

Mr. O'Rielly, first of all, thank you for coming here. On your presentation, we needed a summary of what this is all about, and you probably have it here. Your report is very concise, right to the point, and your options are the only realistic options, the steps we would like to try to take in an ideal world.

Of course, there's no such thing. But you also have to be realistic, because to think that you can go out with the heavy hand up front.... It's like in the old movie, High Noon--you'd better be quick on the draw. I'm not sure we've practised enough.

I have one question on the NAFO meeting. Who calls the shots? When we go to the NAFO meeting, who leads the charge for Canada? Would people like you, involved in the industry, familiar with what's happening and affected by it, have a lot of input, or do we leave the main discussion in the hands of Foreign Affairs and International Trade, people like that? What is the process at a meeting of NAFO?

¿ (0920)

Mr. Alastair O'Rielly: At the meeting itself, the only person who speaks is the head of the delegation, usually a senior official within the Department of Fisheries and Oceans. Then there are a couple of commissioners who sit at the table but don't speak. Then there's usually a group of advisers, such as me, who participate in delegation meetings throughout the conduct of the meeting.

That's really critical at that stage, but perhaps the activity that leads into that is more important in terms of planning for the meeting and deciding what our strategy is going to be, what our issues are going to be, and how they're carried out.

In terms of the question you were speaking to, Mr. Hearn, that process is really not a problem, in my view. The issue is much broader than that. I think we have full opportunity to bring forward our views and discuss what we think is appropriate to do and what's needed.

The real issue is that the NAFO structure doesn't really facilitate Canada's moving forward. The Department of Fisheries and Oceans, I think, puts a reasonable effort into conducting this work. I don't think DFO is where the issue is for us.

What I think we've observed is that the broader context of what mandate Canada is going to have and how forceful Canada is going to be in these issues is an issue that probably more clearly rests with Foreign Affairs and International Trade. They look at things in a different context, in a different perspective. For them, you'd have to perceive this not to have as great a significance and as great a value as it does for the Department of Fisheries and Oceans.

All too often, Canada doesn't place the correct priority on what has to be achieved here and on what the value of this activity is, and in that context, it doesn't provide sufficient resources and mandate to the Department of Fisheries and Oceans to do what's needed and have the political power and strength of conviction of the Government of Canada in carrying out its responsibilities within NAFO.

Mr. Loyola Hearn: We had a briefing the other night from Foreign Affairs and International Trade. It was an eye-opener.

From what I gathered--and I would think it's the view of the committee--the only discussion on overfishing or the problems we talked about.... By the way, it's interesting to note that there were 25 violations in 1994; the next year there was one, when we had the incident; but I'm told that last year there were six and this year, so far, 26. So violations are increasing. Those are the ones that we know of, of course.

In our discussions with Foreign Affairs and International Trade, the impression we got was that except for what goes on at NAFO meetings, there was no other contact with countries trying to work out a solution above and beyond Foreign Affairs. In fact, we asked them pointedly, is there anybody out tonight, for instance, among some of these perhaps more friendly members--there are only 17 countries involved, in total--to try to talk about it, because they're as interested in our resources and protecting them as we are ourselves, in many cases.

There has to be a good guy there. Maybe there have to be many good members who would support us, especially in light of declining stocks. For the past 20 years, apparently, there has been no move to try to exert our influence in control of the nose and tail and the Flemish Cap. If we don't get somebody knocking on doors trying to get support, we're in trouble, major trouble. I'd like your view on that.

Secondly, you mentioned the 60,000 tonnes of product we should have if this were managed properly. In light of jobs, you mentioned six plants. Now, for some people a fish plant could be 20 people working. I know what you mean. But for the membership, just to give an effect of what it will be in Newfoundland, what would it translate to in terms of year-round jobs if there were six full-time plants working, perhaps including direct and indirect employment, from what you would see on average?

¿ (0925)

Mr. Alastair O'Rielly: Well, on the issue of NAFO and its efficacy and its priority within Canada, I think it's fair to say that Canada raises many of these issues at bilateral meetings with member countries. The evidence would probably be there for that. I think the Foreign Affairs people could cite that they met with the EU on this occasion and they raised this matter, and they met with Russia and they raised this issue, and so on. But that's all that happens; it's only raised, it's noted. There's no consequence to it, there's no forcefulness to it, there's no real assertion of what needs to be done to change it.

The other problem in terms of our approach is that Canada doesn't accept that there's an alternative. It appears that Canada's approach is that NAFO is the only game in town and there is no other choice for us, so we'll carry on doing the best we can with NAFO, and if it doesn't work, well, we've tried. That's just not acceptable. Either we decide that NAFO is going to live its life and become effective, or its life is going to have to terminate and we're going to have to pursue the alternative. We have to get to that kind of juncture before we move forward.

On the question of timing, I think we're victims of our own circumstances and our own lack of forcefulness within NAFO. Right now, for us to move forward and be seen, to marshall the resources, to develop the alliances to make the case, unfortunately is going to take us two or three years. I'd like to say that it could be done in two or three months, but I think it would take us two or three years of bringing forward a strategy, telling the rest of NAFO members what the line in the sand is in terms of the regime, and then working towards that objective. Then if we fail to achieve it, we'll have the conviction, the resources, the case, and the circumstance to go forward with custodial management. So I think that's the timeframe.

Mr. Hearn, to go back to your jobs question, it's difficult to estimate what the direct employment impacts would be. In the plants themselves, you're probably looking at 300 to 400 people per plant. That number is quite significant in those communities. It's really the life of a community. Of course, from that there's a spinoff in indirect jobs and service jobs that are associated. There's quite a significant employment impact as well on the vessels themselves that would be used to harvest this resource.

One of the things Ray is familiar with firsthand, and hopefully a lot of others are also, is that the offshore plants we had in Newfoundland were truly models as to what effective, viable, and meaningful communities ought to be. I don't want to sound like I'm being pejorative with respect to our other communities, but the offshore communities had year-round employment, they had decent incomes, they had stability, and they had all the wherewithal that you'd have in any modern, industrial, western society in terms of recreational facilities and in terms of the things we all value as being an important part of our lifestyles. All that can be achieved with the kinds of resources we're talking to in each of these communities.

The Chair: Thank you, Mr. O'Rielly.

Mr. Lunney.

Mr. James Lunney (Nanaimo--Alberni, Canadian Alliance): Thank you, Mr. Chair.

The question I had on time was just addressed and answered by Mr. Hearn. I think it's a very important question, how much time we should give the NAFO process. Thank you for already addressing that.

The other question I wanted to raise was picking up on what Mr. Wappel had raised on the question of naming the countries that are guilty. He asked whether a rationale was given as to why they didn't want to name the countries. Is it reasonable to assume that if they did name the countries, the observers would come under pressure from the vessels...? As long as there are no consequences to the reports, there isn't a lot of pressure on the observers. But if they started naming the countries, then of course with people coming under scrutiny because of that, the observers would come under pressure. But if no action is taken, there's minimal pressure on the observers, and of course the limited compliance you have could get even worse.

If there are no consequences and no action to the other consequences that come out of this, there's very little encouragement for the observers to report. If they feel they report and it's not being acted on, it leads to the same thing as enforcement in other areas: why bother to report?

So is it reasonable to assume this is a very big problem because we have foreign nationals on board? With some of the fishermen we've had to deal with, I imagine if you're bouncing around in a sea all by yourself out there and you're reporting on something and the fishermen aren't happy with you, it might be a rather uncomfortable position to be in.

Would you comment on that?

¿ (0930)

The Chair: Mr. O'Rielly.

Mr. Alastair O'Rielly: Thank you for the question. In terms of the rationale for not divulging it, as I said earlier, the intent at this stage is to get this on the table and then look at divulging the activities of individual countries later. There may be a tactic there of some value, in just giving us the big-picture perspective, and then following through.

On the impact on observers, you're right about the dynamics, but that really wouldn't change too much. The reality, as you accurately described, is an individual on board a fishing vessel whose purpose is to ensure that people are compliant with rules and regulations, and obviously that's not a very comfortable position to be in, on occasion. So I don't know if this would heighten it or diminish it in any way.

The really important issue is to have observers who are competent and truly independent. We're not seeing that in all cases within the NAFO regime. But that's only part of the problem; it's much deeper than that. There's no linkage between what observers see and compliance. Observers are not free, for instance, to call surveillance vessels and report on activities. They just observe and file their reports, so they don't see what actions emerge from that. There are no charges laid as a result of observer activity. That's a huge flaw in that system.

Going beyond that, when charges are laid, the actions are followed through by the member country and there's no evidence of it. We don't see the evidence of it. We don't see the follow-up and the reports. There's no linkage to what actions that country has taken against the offending vessel. So there's a huge number of very serious gaps in terms of how these rules are applied.

If you had a NAFO regime that was working properly, the way it's supposed to work on paper, it would probably be relatively effective. There are things that need to be done to refine it, but the real problem with it is there's just no compliance at any level and no enforcement mechanisms to give it teeth. The only good thing we can say is it contains the damage, to some extent, among a number of countries, so only the 17 or so are engaged. The other benefit is that we have observer coverage, so we know what's happening.

These are relatively modest benefits to be able to report. After 25 years, that's all we've been able to attain within the NAFO structure. We have not been able to fix the overfishing activity within that structure, so in that context it's unacceptable. We cannot make a case to justify continuing with this process for another five to fifteen years. I'm thinking more in the order of two or three.

The Chair: This is your last question, Mr. Lunney. I have two others and a couple myself. We'll go overtime, but go ahead.

Mr. James Lunney: I'll try to make it brief.

If we're going to fix this, this is something that has to be addressed. I think you mentioned that one interesting contribution would be to have a surveillance vessel, aircraft or something for the observers to report to. If they're reporting an infraction, there should be some enforcement, and maybe Canada has to invest in making some kind of enforcement available. And if an infraction is reported, perhaps a change in observer would be required and a foreign observer would have to be put on the vessel. Those are the things that have to be addressed if we're going to fix the problem. Would you agree?

¿ (0935)

Mr. Alastair O'Rielly: Absolutely, they're fundamental. You have to have that, plus you have to have the evidence of sufficient penalties that are applied when the infractions are noted to constitute an appropriate penalty and an appropriate deterrent effect, and we don't see any evidence of that either. That of course clearly explains why NAFO doesn't work.

The Chair: Thank you, Mr. Lunney.

Monsieur Roy, Mr. Matthews, and then I have a couple to sum up.

[Translation]

Mr. Jean-Yves Roy: Thank you, Mr. Chair. It's just a short question. Basically, we are told that we would have to name the countries. I had asked the question, during a previous meeting, to find out, exactly, which were the worst countries. I was told that it was not necessarily countries of the European Economic Community, although my question was not answered.

In your opinion, which is the worst country, at this point in time, and which are the two or three worst countries? If we have to name them, we'll start here.

[English]

Mr. Alastair O'Rielly: One problem in terms of speaking to that question is that we haven't been given that information to say.... For instance, when you look at the list that's in this report of all these infractions, and there was a vessel that had 600 tonnes of moratoria species on board, I have a pretty good idea which flag state that was, but I don't have the knowledge to say I know that it was one country or another. But I can tell you that my understanding is that almost all the groundfish infractions that are cited there are by EU vessels. The infractions that are related to shrimp of course are more in the context of Scandinavian vessels, with the failure to file observer reports and so on. It's also well known that within the EU almost all of the fishing activity effectively is carried out by Spain and Portugal.

So we know who it is, but I can't speak to point four to say that this was the...because I don't have that information as to what that vessel was. DFO has it, and certainly we're very anxious to see them share that with us and with everybody else.

The Chair: I want to deal with that point, Monsieur Roy.

In terms of the countries you mentioned in this case, Alastair--and I know we're only dealing with NAFO here--I'm certainly led to believe that these are the same countries that are overexploiting fish species around the world, whether it's off Australia or whether it's off other coasts as well. Is that true?

Mr. Alastair O'Rielly: Our understanding is that these countries are noted for fishing with total disregard for conservation outside their own waters. Whether they've overfished their own zones and they're now feeding on the rest of the world's resources.... But there's evidence to indicate that they've been guilty of this kind of activity beyond Canada.

The Chair: Why I raise that point is because maybe we need to be looking beyond NAFO to other alliances around the world, to other fora, to start to isolate these countries from overexploiting fish stocks globally.

Mr. Alastair O'Rielly: I think you're right. But the problem is, what are the other fora that you could pursue this within? Perhaps there's the United Nations in terms of FAO and that kind of thing. There is some force of argument, or some issues, that perhaps you could pursue within that kind of a context, but I have to believe that wouldn't be a whole lot better than the NAFO structure. I think Canada really has to step up to the plate here in terms of what our interests are as a coastal state and make the case.

And it's recognized in UNFA anyway that the rights of the coastal state are primary and that there are issues that Canada can demonstrate and show leadership on in dealing with these matters and still be recognized and acknowledged by the international community as being fair and reasonable. I think that kind of approach is probably going to give us more effect than finding another kind of NAFO regime to work within.

The Chair: Mr. Roy, go ahead.

[Translation]

Mr. Jean-Yves Roy: In fact, you are answering in two ways. You also answered the Chair in two ways.

On the one hand, you tell us that you can't name them because you don't have enough evidence, not enough knowledge. On the other hand, you tell us that we have enough evidence at the international level. So, I have some problems with your response.

Do we have evidence, yes or no, concerning the countries which are guilty? If we don't have the evidence, what would we have to do to get it? You are answering us in two ways. On the one hand, you tell us that you can't tell us which countries they are because you have no real evidence and, on the other hand, that we have the evidence at the international level. Do we have the evidence, yes or no?

¿ (0940)

[English]

Mr. Alastair O'Rielly: I appreciate the question. What I'm saying to you is that in respect to divulging which countries are guilty of these infractions and being able to say to you I understand the vessel that caught the 36 tonnes of American plaice was a Spanish vessel or a Portuguese vessel, I don't know. But I'm very confident in saying that almost all of these infractions are from EU vessels, and almost all those are Spanish and Portuguese.

The issue of evidence about the transgressions of these countries outside NAFO and in other forums is really one of reputation. I think one of the things that gives rise to my comment there is that in the case of the Estai incident, one of the reasons Canada's actions there, which were obviously very demonstrative of our concern and very unusual for Canada--taking this kind of extremely aggressive action against an ally in many respects and a trading partner within the EU--were acknowledged and understood and accepted to the extent they were was because of the well-known reputations of these countries as rogues within the international community in terms of foreign fishing activities. That's acknowledged within the EU, as it is within Canada.

The Chair: Thanks, Mr. O'Rielly. I want to bring this back to Canada for a moment and our strategy as a country in dealing with the overfishing issue, or illegal fishing.

We've had a lot of comments on the seizing of the Estai and what happened in 1995, some saying it was a success, some that it wasn't a success, and you've noted in your presentation that we did get 100% observer coverage. Some things happened. Certainly infractions were down, but we negotiated. Turbot quotas were reduced from 60% to 37%.

Be as direct as you can be on this. Would I be correct in suggesting that when we took on the Estai it was unusual for Canada? But we had a strong minister from Newfoundland at the time and a strong deputy minister at the time. We had support from the Prime Minister. There was certainly opposition within cabinet. But would I be right in suggesting that when the issue left that level and that minister--that department, and DND and its involvement--somehow we negotiated success away? Would that be a correct assumption?

Mr. Alastair O'Rielly: I think that's partially true, saying we negotiated it away, because in terms of trying to get the observer coverage afterwards and to achieve some benefits within the NAFO regime, we did dramatically reduce our share of the turbot resource. That's something we'll live with for a long time, maybe forever. Who knows? Certainly we paid a huge price to achieve some benefits within that context. We negotiated that.

But in terms of the broader question you're speaking to, we're seeing a lot of slippage in compliance since 1995, and that degree of non-compliance is increasing. That's not something we negotiated away; it's something we're allowing to happen because of our failure to be more assertive in enforcing conservation within the NAFO structure or in demonstrating to the rest of the world that we're not prepared to carry on in this vein in perpetuity. Unfortunately, in my opinion that's what we are communicating to the rest of the world: we'll do the best we can with NAFO, and if it works, fine; if it doesn't work, well, we tried. That's the part I'm suggesting is just not good enough.

The Chair: That moves to my next point, because it was mentioned yesterday by several witnesses that Canada is seen globally as a pussycat. From my own point of view I wonder if there is a mentality setting in that when it comes to trade, when it comes to protecting ourselves in trade issues, when it comes to protecting our resources or the resources off our continental shelf, in fact we're increasingly seen by the world as pussycats and we don't stand up?

This is much broader than the fisheries issues. I've been involved in half a dozen agriculture issues: greenhouse tomatoes, the potato wart issue on Prince Edward Island, the Canadian Wheat Board, softwood lumber. The issues go on and on. Is there a problem within our own government, bureaucracies, whatever, in terms of taking the hard stance? Our difficulty as a committee here is that we're the Standing Committee on Fisheries and Oceans and some of these issues that are being addressed here today need to be talked about by the Standing Committee on Foreign Affairs and International Trade, or the joint committee or whatever.

But more and more I see--and I don't mind saying it--that for whatever reason our trade negotiators do not seem to have the backbone to stand up for the country and for our industries the way they should be. Is it a mentality in Ottawa, is it a mentality in the legal minds of the people who are in those departments, or what is it?

What's your view on that?

Mr. Alastair O'Rielly: First of all, I agree with your characterization of the issue within the federal government.

It seems to us that the people in Foreign Affairs and International Trade are really interested in being nice guys. They really want to be seen as facilitators, as people who are cooperative, who are never going to challenge the world. They're never going to take issue with things in a serious vein. Every time an issue comes forward, and for every idea that comes forward, we're presented with very eloquent arguments as to why you can't do it. They have a tremendous capacity for explaining in legalese what are the impediments to going forward with any kind of assertive actions. It's a mindset, it's a whole culture within that department that holds sway there.

Maybe you're right, it's much broader than fisheries. But we feel that even within Foreign Affairs and International Trade fisheries is an extremely low priority. I don't even know if it's on their radar screen at all. I spoke to you before with reference to the comments on the tariff issues, and, again, the tariff issues we have are primarily with the EU as well.

It's galling how ineffective we are in moving some of those issues forward. We don't have time to get into it--this is not the forum--but this past fall on that very issue we talked of before, the shrimp tariffs, we made tremendous progress in terms of working that system within the EU to a point where we were ready to get this issue on an agenda of EU ministers in the latter part of the year. But Canada was then stopped by bureaucrats, let alone member countries. It's appalling how ineffective we are on that front. We need a complete metamorphosis in terms of approach, and philosophy, and probably personnel within that structure.

The Chair: Yes, I don't think you'll get much disagreement from us on that one.

We met with DFAIT last Monday night until 10 p.m. and it was an eye-opener--and I don't mind saying that--on how weak-kneed we can be when it comes to taking on some challenges. I think we showed by seizing the Estai that we can take tough decisions, but have we got the capacity to stand up to them?

¿ (0945)

The last point I want to make, which relates to this committee, is that one of the things that worries me somewhat as chair is that we've only been talking amongst ourselves. I'm wondering what your thoughts might be on this. We will come up with a report, certainly, but we somehow have to develop a strategy where we're going to push that forward. There are a number of committees and associations for which this is not an issue. There's the Canada-Europe Parliamentary Association committee. I've been on that committee. In fact, I met with the fisheries committee in the European Union when the Estai issue was on. Since all parties are on those committees as members, maybe we should be pushing that committee to make this the major issue when they're there. There's the Commonwealth Parliamentary Association and a number of others.

I'm wondering whether, regardless of what we come up with in our report, you have any suggestions on where we should be moving strategically to find the pressure points and bring the issue forward, including at the prime ministers meeting at G-8. Should it be an issue there? Do you have any suggestions?

¿ (0950)

Mr. Alastair O'Rielly: Yes. How do you get this issue elevated to the point where it's taken seriously by the Government of Canada and then consequently raised effectively with other member countries of NAFO and other international forums? It bedevils us as to how we're going to achieve that. But it really isn't as complicated as it appears. The major issue is with the EU. That's where we have to have effect. They're the largest holder of the fishing rights, they have the longest history of involvement, and they constitute the major culprits within NAFO. They're susceptible to all kinds of political pressures, as all of you are and as the world is.

We have to find where the pressure points are within the EU, and there are lots of them. There are green parties and that kind of thing. The people of the European Union don't want to be seen as rogues and as being non-compliant with fishing regulations and damaging the environment and precluding resource recovery. They need to understand what their own country and their own union is doing, what it's guilty of. That's not coming out, that's not being communicated. That's where we really have to take action and have effect, because ultimately we have to get the people of the EU to understand what they're guilty of here.

I think they'd be terribly embarrassed to learn, when they do learn--and I'm fully expecting that they will learn--who these flag states are that are guilty of these infractions. That in itself ought to constitute some measure of deterrence and at least get the issue elevated to a point where the Prime Minister can raise it. We'd very much welcome seeing this as an agenda item at the G-8 level.

The Chair: Thank you, Peter. I'm going to get you to hold your question until the next witness. We're already 18 minutes over. We're starting to run behind time already.

Thank you very much, Mr. O'Rielly. I call on Earle McCurdy as the next witness, please.

We have before us the Fish, Food and Allied Workers Union, Earle McCurdy, president, and Ches Cribb, vice-president.

Go ahead, Mr. McCurdy; the floor is yours.

¿ (0955)

Mr. Earle McCurdy (President, Fish, Food and Allied Workers Union): Thank you, Mr. Chair.

I'd like to thank the committee for coming to St. John's on this issue, which is obviously a very important one to people in this province. Ches Cribb, my colleague here, is the vice-president of our deep sea division, a division where there used to be about 1,200 offshore trawlermen fishing mostly on the Grand Banks. They're down to maybe 250. Those jobs were lost as a direct result of the collapse of the stocks that straddle our 200-mile limit. Certainly the people he's representing.... He's spent most of his time in the last ten years trying to help trawlermen find jobs in other industries, because the jobs their forefathers depended on and they depended on disappeared as a result of the collapse of our stocks.

This is certainly a timely year, I think an important year, to be really having a hard look at what's going on with Canada's performance in protecting the stocks that straddle our economic zone. It's the 25th anniversary of NAFO, the 25th anniversary of the extension of jurisdiction to 200 miles, and it's also the 10th anniversary of probably the darkest day in this province in my lifetime, which was the announcement by the then Minister of Fisheries and Oceans, on July 2, 1992, of a moratorium on what until then had been Canada's greatest fish stock, the northern cod stocks. So it really is a year when we've got to do some very hard analysis--a very critical analysis of our performance as a country with a view to fixing some of these very serious problems.

I don't want to go into any great amount of history, but just very briefly trace a few of the key developments in recognition of coastal states and protection of fish stocks adjacent to coastal states. The Geneva Convention of 1958 and the Law of the Sea in 1982 both recognized the special interests of coastal states. I was eight years old when the Geneva Convention was declared, so I don't have a whole lot of first-hand knowledge of it, but I understand from reading about it that it was really a key step.

The Law of the Sea also established an overriding obligation of conservation. It's not something you might want to consider; it's something that under the Law of the Sea countries are obliged to do: protect the fish stocks, which after all are food stocks that have an important role to play in feeding a hungry world. It is a responsibility and obligation on coastal states to protect those resources.

The next major development following the Law of the Sea was UNFA, the United Nations Fisheries Agreement, dealing with straddling and highly migratory fish stocks. That came about at the initiative of Canada. It was a series of meetings held at the United Nations over a two- or three-year time period. There was ultimately a document arrived at which, if it were in full force and effect, would certainly go a long way towards dealing with the proper conservation and protection of our resources.

For reasons that still baffle me, although Canada was the instigator of that whole process and really forced the issue to have it happen in the first place, I believe Canada was the 27th country to actually endorse the thing, which is mind-boggling to me. It is absolutely beyond me why we wouldn't have wanted to be first. When we slipped up and missed being first, I don't know why we wouldn't have tried to be second or third. It was an inexcusable lapse not to pursue that. I won't bore you with all the details--there's a lot of technical mumbo-jumbo in there--but some very important items are dealt with.

One is the provision for compatibility in management measures inside and outside economic zones. There's a requirement on states fishing outside the zone to adhere to measures that are compatible with the restrictions inside. There's a requirement to adhere to conservation measures, a reasonable dispute settlement procedure, and so on. There are a number of very key items in the UNFA agreement.

A problem with UNFA is that it only has any relevance to those countries that endorse it, and virtually none of the key players in NAFO have endorsed it. We've been told for about the last three years by people from Foreign Affairs, with straight faces, that by September of this year, or something like that, they anticipate the European Union will be part of UNFA. Well, spare us. It's one thing to disregard what we say, but don't treat us like complete fools. The European Union is going to fiddle around with that forever. EU stands for extremely uncooperative, as best as I can figure out. It certainly has no intention of moving forward on that. They'll come up with a bewildering array of excuses as to why they can't get it done quite as soon as they thought, all of which are hog-wash.

From time to time, Canada has taken steps to assert jurisdiction of fisheries off our coast. Certainly a key one was to protect coastal fishing areas, in 1964. It was only in 1970--not that long ago--that Canada took steps to close lines for the Gulf of St. Lawrence and the Bay of Fundy. Prior to that they were open to international fishing. They also adopted a 12-mile territorial sea. Prior to that it was three miles.

In 1977, Canada extended jurisdiction to 200 miles. In 1994--just listening to some of the questions to the previous witness--it was a case of a minister who was willing to take the bull by the horns and implement Bill C-29. My guess is this room couldn't hold the lawyers in Ottawa who said, “You can't pass Bill C-29”. You'd probably need the stadium down the road to hold them all.

The government did that, and when two American vessels were fishing for scallops--which would have been to our great detriment, and they ultimately would have been fishing the crab stocks that are now fished there and provide a lot of valuable jobs--they were arrested. One of the outcomes of that was that scallop and crab were accepted by the American government as being sedentary species. Under the Law of the Sea, jurisdiction for sedentary species extends to the edge of the continental shelf, not just two hundred miles.

I'm trying to figure how we can get American plaice and turbot and some of those declared sedentary, but I think that's a tough sell. So I'll have to go at that one a little bit differently.

The other step Canada took was the turbot war in 1995 and the arrest of the Estai. While these were going on, there were a couple of attempts by regional organizations to manage fisheries. ICNAF was the first, and it was so bad it almost made NAFO look good. There was no regard whatsoever for conservation. Just set quotas at whatever level anyone wanted to fish, and then add a little more just in case. So it was a totally ineffective organization.

NAFO was supposed to represent the ushering in of a new era. The NAFO convention, with the extension of jurisdiction, was really supposed to be a major turning point in the protection of our stocks.

À (1000)

To understand how NAFO works, think back to the judging of figure skating in the Olympics. The French judge supported the Russian judge in the pairs competition, and in return the Russian judge supported the French in whatever they were in--the trapeze act, or whatever their particular thing was. What brought it home to me was seeing that the judge from the Ukraine automatically gave the same mark as the Russians every time, supporting the Russians. And it's so much like that when we sit in NAFO.

At the last NAFO meeting in January, what you had was the Scandinavians supporting the EU on an increase in the turbot quota that was higher than the one the scientific council of NAFO had recommended; and in return, the European Union went along with an increase in the amount of export permitted on shrimp on the Flemish Cap, in which they have no interest. We'll vote for your overfishing there if you'll vote for our overfishing here. I almost expected them to hold up cards with 5.9 written on them; that's how similar it was to the fiasco we saw on television during the Olympics.

I have a little bit of show and tell here today; we need a little something to break up the monotony. This is a piece of the net from the Portuguese boat seized in 1994. Use of this net is really a capital offence in fishing. A sardine with anorexia wouldn't get through this. Take this net, get it soaking wet and stretched in the water, and then figure out what'll pass through it.

What happened with that kind of fishing, which was largely perpetrated by Spanish and Portuguese vessels--they didn't have a monopoly on abuse, but they certainly had the gold medal.... I'll just pass it around for people to look at. The single largest piece here, the orange one, is smaller than the regulation mesh in effect at the time.

The Trepassey plant that used to employ 600 people in Mr. Hearn's riding has been dismantled and is now over in Africa, and Burgeo, where Mayor Hann is from--who I understand you heard from yesterday--is in such terrible condition and under such pressure today because people fished with this kind of gear in the 1980s and 1990s. They not only caught the fish that might have fed us in 1989-90, 1991-92, they caught the very young ones that should have been our prime catch today.

My fear is that we're headed backwards in NAFO. There was a time after the Estai action when the companies put up a bit of a fight over this. Things settled down for a while and the level of compliance was reasonably good for a time. But the reverberation of that bullet has long passed from anyone's memory. They're now slipping back into their old ways. And the use of this kind of gear is probably what will be next if we don't seriously toughen up on what's going on.

The Canadian presentation at the recent NAFO meeting was a very strong one. It was forceful and to the point. And all we got for our troubles was that they thumbed their noses at us. Canada now has a responsibility. Making the kind of presentation we made was a turning point; it had to be. Now doing nothing about the reply is not an option.

Canada decided to make a very forceful presentation. You would expect the result to have been some willingness to correct the problems on the part of the other NAFO members. Not a chance. Canada threw down the gauntlet, and the other countries picked it up and slapped us in the face with it. Now we're wondering if we're going to do anything about it. We don't have any choice; when you throw down the gauntlet, you have to be willing to follow through on it.

The meeting coming up this fall will be absolutely critical. One of the things under attack at NAFO this fall will be 100% observer coverage. This is not solving all our problems, but the thought of moving backwards from it is absolutely galling to me. We have to be ready for a rough meeting.

Clearly, our long-term goal has to be to establish control over the stocks--some people have put forward the idea of custodial management--some form of Canadian control and enforcement of the stocks on the continental shelf. I don't think we'll ever get any satisfaction without this. There are a couple of interim steps we can take and must take. We have to make it clear to the countries out there that Bill C-29 is still in full force and effect, and that the Canadian government is prepared to use it when and as necessary.

À (1005)

It did, by the way, have a very significant impact in getting rid of non-contracting, non-NAFO member countries that were major problems prior to 1995. In fact, Bill C-29 was quite effective in dealing with them. We need to be clear now. I don't think our position is clear in the fishing world any longer. In fact, it's clear that Canada's really not prepared to do much. This is the problem.

We have to dust off Bill C-29 and make it clear that it is back in play. Secondly, I believe Canada should forthwith--certainly no later than June, and earlier if possible--lay out a set of criteria that fishing countries would have to meet in order to be eligible to use our ports.

I don't believe we should be kicking everyone out of the ports, including the countries that are playing ball and cooperating--and there are a couple. That's not the way to go. But if we say, “Here are the rules you, as a fishing country, have to follow if your vessels are going to use our ports: number one, 100% observer coverage”, then all of a sudden the countries lining up to vote against this measure at the NAFO meeting this fall would have to say, “Hang on a minute, now, if this gets voted out of NAFO....” We need make no reference to NAFO. We just have to say that countries have to have a proper credited observer program on their boats or they're out of our ports.

In my estimation, the majority of the NAFO countries would have great difficulty operating without the right to use our ports. The Europeans have made other arrangements. They haven't used our ports ever since we kicked them out 15 or 20 years ago. But the shrimpers do--the Scandinavians, the Baltics, the Russians, the Japanese.

St. Pierre isn't a valid alternative for them. Discussions could be held to head this off from becoming a reality. This would significantly strengthen our hand going into this fall's NAFO meeting.

We also have to deal with the Faroese, the fishermen from the Faroe Islands--population 37,000--who have vessels out there now, and if they're not out there today, they certainly were yesterday or the day before. They're fishing in 3L, an area where our shrimp fleet is disadvantaged by very low quotas. They're out there fishing far in excess of the fishing time they're entitled to. We have to crack down on them. Theirs is the first country we should make an example of.

The violations were very well documented. Most people don't know about the American plaice; they probably think it's a shopping mall. American plaice is historically one of the most job-creating species in our province. We once had 55,000 tonnes as a quota, of which 98.5% or 97.5% was Canadian. It was a tremendous provider of jobs, in conjunction with yellowtail flounder. We're out there now being driven absolutely silly. The people who are fishing yellowtail flounder are trying to avoid plaice bycatch, while European fleets are pretending to direct for fisheries like turbot and skate, and in reality are directing for the moratorium species, American plaice.

There was a proposal for a depth restriction at the recent NAFO meeting--in other words, a proposal to restrict the depth of water in which it could be fished for--to avoid the depths in which American plaice is prevalent. The proposal Canada brought forward was very well supported by scientific, almost arithmetic, information showing that a commercially successful fishery for turbot could take place in the deeper water with virtually no bycatch of American plaice, and it was voted down by the NAFO countries.

We need a national campaign to protect our straddling stocks. It's a matter of sovereignty. We once had about 350,000 tonnes of groundfish in Atlantic Canada; today it's in the order of 50,000 tonnes. That's 300,000 tonnes difference. That's 660 million pounds annually, which would certainly put communities like Burgeo and a whole host of others that are now struggling, like Ramea, Harbour Breton, Fortune.... We had 1,000 people show up at a meeting recently in Marystown over these layoffs that FPI was proposing. American plaice was once their bread and butter.

It's a critical matter. The Government of Canada has a responsibility to get serious about this. It won't happen at the official level. It has to happen at the political level, just as the Estai affair came about because of a political decision to do something. If we had waited for the Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade to say, okay, let's arrest the Estai, it would still be out there.

We are looking to our political leaders to take action. The tenth anniversary of our moratorium and the twenty-fifth anniversary of the 200-mile limit is a pretty good year in which to do it.

Thank you.

À (1010)

The Chair: Thank you very much, Mr. McCurdy.

Mr. Burton.

À (1015)

Mr. Andy Burton: Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

And thank you for your presentation. It's certainly a common theme we're hearing. I certainly appreciate that.

I guess my question...it's a lack of knowledge on my part, but perhaps you can help me out here. It's about the Law of the Sea. You mention recognizing the special interests of a coastal state and an overriding obligation for conservation. Could you possibly expand on that a bit for my knowledge and for some of the others?

Mr. Earle McCurdy: The Law of the Sea is really a framework. Canada took forever to sign that one too.

I'm no legal expert, but my understanding of the Law of the Sea is that it's really more of an international context for how people can operate. While it's called the Law of the Sea, it's not a law passed by sovereign states. But I do believe it provides the framework. When Canada declared Bill C-29, for instance, there were aspects of the Law of the Sea that it cited in its rationale for its decision to go forward.

But what the Law of the Sea does--it was negotiated painfully over quite a number of years--is it sets forth some principles and ground rules that are supposed to govern fishing activity on the high seas and in international waters and so on, as well as in coastal waters.

Mr. Andy Burton: What kind of strength does that have? I mean, obviously one of the huge problems with NAFO is that it has no teeth. Does the Law of the Sea have any teeth that could be utilized to strengthen NAFO?

Mr. Earle McCurdy: In my understanding, I don't think the Law of the Sea has the force of law in it; there's no sovereign state under which it's enacted. I think it's more in the order of guidelines or principles. But I believe the principles that are set forth there are ones that a country can use and can cite in taking action to protect its stock.

So I think it's of relevance, at least to that extent. But I don't put myself forward as an expert in the details of the Law of the Sea, because I'm not.

The Chair: Andy, I have with me a number of the articles from the Law of the Sea that apply. We'll get that copied and give it to committee members.

Mr. Andy Burton: Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

The Chair: Mr. Roy.

[Translation]

Mr. Jean-Yves Roy: Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Thank you for your presentation. I haven't made any agreements with anyone but I would give your presentation a 10.

You're not just skating around the issue. You referred to a solution which, among others, we spoke about previously. It is, if you will, a protest campaign that should be orchestrated by Canada. I would like you to go a bit further in that direction.

Once again, I am going to ask the same question I asked the previous witness. Are you considering an information campaign?

You have no faith in NAFO; that seems very clear to me. Would you want Canada to simply and completely withdraw from it? Other witnesses here have told us and we must emphasize that Canada pays 50% of NAFO's operating costs.

So, would you contemplate simply withdrawing from NAFO and using the 50% of the costs, in fact, to mount a true protest campaign? Ultimately, if the government does not undertake that campaign, do you, as a union, intend to act with the industry and undertake such a campaign?

I am going to give you a very specific example of what you have all experienced here, that of the infamous issue of the seals and the campaign launched by Brigitte Bardot and company, which, ultimately yielded absolutely extraordinary results.

As an industry and as a union, could you not consider such a campaign? After all, what they are causing to disappear is a very important resource, not only for Canada, but for all the countries in the European Economic Community. It is a very, very important food resource which may disappear in a very short time. We have to make the rest of the world understand that the resource is far from inexhaustible and that it is a short-term risk from the point of view of the food supply.

[English]

The Chair: Mr. McCurdy or Mr. Cribb, any time you feel like coming in, go ahead.

À (1020)

Mr. Earle McCurdy: I never seem to have the same array of cameramen following me that Brigette Bardot always seemed to have, so I'm probably at a bit of a disadvantage in North America in that regard. I'm at a loss to understand why, but it's an unfair world, I guess.

I think there's a real need for a major information campaign that will require the resources of the federal government. I think we can do our bit, and we should, and others in industry have a role to play as well. Our provincial government has a role to play--particularly the Newfoundland government--because the overwhelming impact of these NAFO issue is felt in this province.

But we need the full political support of the national government to be successful. They have to instruct the people in their embassies and they have to be part of an information campaign. A prime minister or minister has an automatic kind of public following and the ability to get things out to a much bigger audience.

The theatrics of New York were very critical in 1995 in that whole Estai affair. You had a minister of the crown, and it was a bit of a show, but I was in Europe the following couple of days, and it was on every TV station. I clicked around the dial and didn't even know what language it was, let alone understand it, but there was the turbot and the net in front of the United Nations.

We have to be, I think, very aggressive on it. I don't know what it takes to get the attention at the top of the House in Ottawa, but it's needed. We're just spinning our tires.

As to NAFO, I think the communications strategy should come first, as opposed to saying we're out of NAFO and now in the alternative we'll have a communications strategy. While the amount of money that's involved in NAFO is a significant amount of money at one level, in relation to the total NAFO budget, if you had it and applied it to enforcement on the Grand Banks, for example, it would be relatively insignificant.

NAFO is clearly not working as presently structured. I think what we need is a strategy to try to make it work. Ultimately, if NAFO doesn't work, we have to be prepared for further action, but unless and until we have enforcement vessels willing to arrest people on the nose and tail of the Grand Banks, as happened in 1995.... I think we have to be at that level of readiness first, before we actually get out of NAFO. I think we should look at alternatives, but we want to be sure we have our alternatives in place first.

The Chair: Mr. Roy.

[Translation]

Mr. Jean-Yves Roy: This may not be a question which can be addressed directly to Mr. McCurdy.

Ultimately, we are talking about costs. I just spoke about this: we pay 50% of NAFO's operating costs. I don't know if anyone at the table can answer my question. How much does our participation in NAFO represent every year? How much money do we invest as a nation? I don't have the answer to that.

[English]

Mr. Bill Matthews (Burin--St. George's, Lib.): It's half a million dollars.

[Translation]

Mr. Jean-Yves Roy: We invest $500,000. I think that would be a significant amount for a good information campaign.

Thank you.

[English]

Mr. Earle McCurdy: My view is the Canadian government should invest that kind of money in an information campaign, and probably more besides. But I don't think that's an either/or proposition. That's just something we should do. In the long run, if we can find and develop an alternative to NAFO, I am all ears. But I don't think we should say an information campaign is an appropriate substitute. I think those are two different things.

The Chair: Thank you, Mr. McCurdy.

Just while I think of it, coming out of the discussion there, probably your organization and others should also approach the Premier of Newfoundland and Labrador to put the issue on the agenda of the first ministers meeting. If we try to get the Prime Minister to bring it forward.... If it's an issue at that table, with all the first ministers of the country, it's a lot easier for us to push it as well. I just make a suggestion while I think of it.

Mr. Matthews.

Mr. Bill Matthews: Thank you, Mr. Chairman, and I want to thank Mr. McCurdy and Mr. Cribb for appearing and making a presentation.

I listened very carefully, Earle, while you talked about having a communications plan and program first, and then some action after. But I think for most of us in this room--and a lot of people were here yesterday as observers and are back today with the committee--it's the frustration of running out of time. You've alluded to what has happened, and you've named a number of communities. It's the frustration that we have with inaction.

There are people who say that our Canadian delegation is completely ineffective. There are those who say the European countries continuously just thumb their nose at us. But in the meantime, we have a way of life that's disappearing; we have a rural part of our province where, as I said yesterday, the spinal cord is ready to crack.

You go regularly. You're part of the Canadian delegation. Are you a commissioner?

From a community and a people's point of view, we're already out of time, and I think that's why people are saying, let's get the hell out of NAFO; let's do this; let do that. But what are your thoughts on time?

We're already out of time in most of our communities. If this continues to go on and we do a communication plan, and then in three or four years' time we threaten to withdraw from NAFO...a lot of our communities are not going to survive that long. So what's your sense on time?

À (1025)

Mr. Earle McCurdy: I think it's an urgent problem.

Just before I forget, I'd like to come back briefly to Mr. Easter's comments. I've done that; Mr. O'Rielly and I met with Premier Grimes with that specific recommendation. We met shortly after the recent NAFO meeting.

I'm not in any way trying to suggest that NAFO has been effective or useful for Canada, but an information campaign is not....

I'm not part of the Government of Canada. I'm not an MP or a cabinet minister. I don't have any say in those matters, but if someone told me that we had a government that was willing to extend jurisdiction at least to deal with the straddling stocks and to fully enforce Canadian sovereignty over there in place of NAFO, I'd be the first one to sing the hosannas. But I don't think simply getting out of NAFO by and of itself puts us any further ahead without the backup plan. What's our alternative? What is the Government of Canada going to do in place of participating in NAFO that's going to protect the stocks that straddle the 200-mile limit?

My experience and what I've seen is that in fact when Canada does flex its muscles, it has some effect. We had a serious threat there in terms of scallop and crab outside 200 miles. The arrest of those American vessels was a very effective step, and the subsequent determination of crab and scallop a sedentary species. The Estai was effective. Iceland, for the last two years, has been threatening to file an objection under the NAFO rules, which you can do.

One of the great weaknesses of NAFO is that an individual country can file an objection and not be bound by a decision of NAFO. Iceland has threatened that for the last two years, and Canada has said, well, if you do that, we're going to close the ports. They haven't done it. They've whined about it, they've moaned and groaned about it, and they haven't done it.

The Faroese were going to file an objection at the recent NAFO meeting, and they didn't do it. In the meantime, they did something that's sleazier, in my opinion. They went out and fished in excess, they misreported, and we have to deal with that.

So I'm not holding any brief for NAFO, but I think getting out of that only makes sense when we have a clear plan as to what we'll do instead, and I'm all ears for that, because I don't think NAFO was serving our interests well at all.

The Chair: Thank you.

Mr. Stoffer.

Mr. Peter Stoffer: Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Just to reiterate, Mr. McCurdy--thank you for your presentation--you are a commissioner on NAFO for Canada. Is that correct?

Mr. Earle McCurdy: Yes.

Actually, just before I come to that, if I could, I'd like to follow up on a point from Mr. Matthews' question.

Mr. Ches Cribb (Vice-President, Deepsea Sector, Fish, Food and Allied Workers Union): I want to follow up on the point that Bill talked about, about the frustration of the people in the communities.

I've been talking with the trawler crews that fish off there, and they're fishing yellowtails at the present time, with a bycatch of American plaice. But for the last couple of years, based on representation from the fishermen's union and Fishery Products International, we've been trying to get some surveys to try to determine what's happening outside the 200-mile limit and why the flounder quotas are not returning, and things like that.

I've talked to the captains and I've talked to the crews, and if you want to consider frustration, it's very frustrating when the crews are out there doing surveys on the yellowtails and they're finding that their bycatch on American plaice, for example, is 50% or they find that the bycatch on skate...because that's what the foreigners talk about catching, 20% skate and 80% American plaice. At the same time as those guys are fishing one-hour tows based on what is set down by scientists in order to do the surveys, they're told catches are 4,000 to 6,000 pounds a tow. At the same time as that's happening, you have foreign boats there that are towing for two and three hours at a tow, and these guys are there day in and day out, continuing to fish, while all the crews on our boats can do is to be permitted to go out and do a survey.

I know that last year, in 2001, for some of the surveys outside the 200-mile limit they had catch rates anywhere from a low of 2,000 to 3,000 pounds a tow up to a high of 14,000 to 15,000 pounds for a one-hour tow. These are American plaice outside the 200-mile limit, and that's where the foreign fleets are continuing to fish. We'll never see a return of the type of fishery we had on American plaice for the plants in Marystown and others along the south coast that depended on it if we can't get control of that.

What I'm saying is that I know what the reports said, what came back from the observers, and what the Canadian delegation took to NAFO, but our crews feel that it's much worse than it seems based on what they see when they go out there to do the surveys.

À (1030)

The Chair: Mr. McCurdy, on Mr. Stoffer's question.

Mr. Earle McCurdy: Yes, that's correct. He was called a commissioner or a representative. I forget what they called him officially.

Mr. Peter Stoffer: You attended the same meetings as the previous speaker had attended as well, is that correct?

Mr. Earle McCurdy: Yes. I'll just briefly describe the Canadian delegation. It consists of a head of delegation, who is a civil servant--in recent years an assistant deputy minister of fisheries management--industry and provincial government advisers, and a number of federal officials who perform various functions and duties under the direction of the head of delegation.

The decisions are essentially made by the minister. The head of delegation goes with directions from the minister and takes advice from the delegation on matters of strategy and tactics, but ultimately it can only go as far as his instructions from the minister entitle him to go.

The only person who actually speaks normally at the meeting.... I can tell you it's pretty frustrating to sit there and listen to some of that stuff and not be able to weigh in with both boots, but the only ones who actually speak are the official representatives, which is to say the ADM, or occasionally in his absence another official will sit in for him. But for the most part it's Mr. Chamut, who, I might say, is a very effective head of delegation within the context of NAFO and what you can do.

The problem we have is that you're in there with.... It's like trying to play poker when you don't get any face cards in your hand. You have a special deck of cards that doesn't give you any face cards; do the best you can with them, but don't expect to draw any kings on your second cards because there aren't any in the deck that's being dealt. It's a bit of a fool's errand.

The Chair: Just for your information, we did meet and have a full hearing with Mr. Chamut following the NAFO meeting, in which he laid out pretty clearly some of the same things Alastair laid out earlier.

Mr. Stoffer.

Mr. Peter Stoffer: Thank you, sir.

Mr. McCurdy, we've heard from other witnesses about the fact that we should close our ports. But this question hasn't been asked yet: with respect to the people who supply those ships with various materials and supplies, are they willing to accept that economic hit in order to achieve what we'd like to do in terms of the nose and tail of the Grand Banks?

Mr. Earle McCurdy: The question is not really whether people are willing to accept a hit, because my guess is that if you ask somebody who has a job there if they're willing to give that up, the answer they'll probably give is no. It happens that some of those people in those jobs are members of our union.

But it's not sufficient. We as a fishing society cannot accept that all we stand to gain from the resources at our doorstep are stevedoring jobs. Therefore, I believe if we proceed in the manner I laid out, which is not to ban everybody.... Cuba, for example, has always been very supportive of Canada in NAFO, and Norway by and large. There is occasionally a problem with Norway, but not often. Norway is generally supportive. If you have a country that is playing by the rules and is supportive, then the use of the ports can affect the useful force of leverage. Once you kick everybody out, what do you do for backup? What's the issue you're going to use to generate support another time on a key issue?

So my view of what we do is that we say, here are the rules you have to follow.

I mentioned observer coverage. We could develop a set of rules, demand compliance with NAFO Scientific Council decisions, or cooperation in the enforcement and application of rules--whatever we draw up. I don't think it would be very complicated. We're not asking anyone to split the atom. It's a fairly straightforward exercise. You develop a set of rules that say countries that play by those rules are welcome in our ports; we welcome your business and your cooperation in enforcement and management. For those who don't, I'm sorry, your business will have to go elsewhere. If that means there are some shore-based economic opportunities lost, so be it. We can't give that priority over the protection of our resources.

If you look at the number of jobs, at best, from that business, and contrast that with the number of jobs in all those major fish processing centres and on the vessels and so on, there's no comparison. In fact, the spin-off jobs alone, not counting the harvesting and processing jobs...there would be more spin-off jobs. If we were catching the stuff, if the stocks were at a level they should be and we were catching them, there would be far more stevedoring jobs.

So we can't be short-sighted on that one. We have to protect our sovereignty and the interests and rights of our population.

À (1035)

The Chair: Thanks, Mr. McCurdy.

Mr. Hearn.

Mr. Loyola Hearn: Thank you, Mr. Chairman. And, once again, thanks to Mr. McCurdy and Mr. Cribb for coming in.

I'm sorry I had to miss part of the presentation, but one of the things I was doing while I was out was trying to arrange, as we mentioned to some committee members yesterday, to raise this issue as an emergency debate in the House, which would also attract attention. Notice was given yesterday in the House. They requested an emergency debate about the Canso issue.

Look at Canso how you like, it's a resource issue, and what's the difference when it comes to a product? If we had this kind of product we're talking about, probably they wouldn't have a problem either. And certainly they're not going to solve it on the backs of Newfoundlanders. But the thing is they've agreed, I think, that we will ask for a debate on the fisheries in Atlantic Canada, and of course, mainly on what we're talking about here.

The other question I was asked, which delayed me a little bit outside, is this. We have control of what is on and under the seabed on the northern tail, from what you tell us--Tom might want to comment on this--and anything inside the 200-mile limit and anything outside that's either under or on the bed, but not what swims over it. But in order for them to catch what swims over it, the gear they use, the dories and the associated gear, disturbs the actual seabed on which the crabs or any other crustaceans exist.

I'm not sure whether that question has ever been asked or dealt with--whether it would have an effect if they have to actually drag the seabed, disturbing what has been determined as our resource to protect. I was asked the question. I haven't heard it asked in any of our discussions, and it might be another avenue to pursue. I'll have you comment on that and one more that I'll throw out.

In relation to the use of our ports, of course the first thing we hear--I guess we saw it when we banned the Spanish and Portuguese earlier--is that you bypass Newfoundland and go to St. Pierre. But the protection of the resource we're talking about certainly has to be to the advantage also of St. Pierre and Miquelon and France generally. If they were on side on this, we wouldn't have to worry about it, because we'd also ban from St. Pierre any country we banned. Whether they'll do it or not, I don't know, but they're not going to do it unless we have some negotiations.

Again, going back to what was said earlier today, from our discussion with Foreign Affairs, I think they're not talking to anybody about any kind of cooperative relationship in relation to developing some support for us as a country against the perpetrators. Heaven knows who our friends might be. Unless we try to find out, we're not going to know, are we?

Mr. Earle McCurdy: No.

On the first issue, it's an interesting comment. I have never heard it raised in that fashion before. In my view, generally, and to the best extent I can tell in international law, international laws emerge when sovereign states decide to take an action to defend their citizens. And there is a world court.

The best I can figure out is that you have to actually agree to accept its jurisdiction in order to be bound by its decisions. So I don't think there's any resolution there. Look at what the Icelanders did in their cod war with the Brits back in the seventies. They just took action. If they had asked the lawyers, they'd have said “Geez, no, you can't do that”, but they did it anyway.

À (1040)

Mr. Loyola Hearn: We heard that last week, by the way. You know, if you guys try to move on this, look what England did: they sent in the navy. Of course what they didn't say is that the Icelanders fired a shot and frightened the life out of them.

Mr. Earle McCurdy: The navy didn't do a damn thing.

Mr. Loyola Hearn: Exactly.

Mr. Earle McCurdy: The EU threatened to send in the navy in 1995, as well. In fact they didn't.

I hadn't heard that. It's an interesting argument. I think it might be worth pursuing.

In the final analysis, I don't think these are legal issues, no matter what legal sleight of hand.... I think they're political issues. Is someone going to say, “That's enough of that. We're going to take action”? I think that's what it comes down to.

On St. Pierre, I have a map at home, and every now and then I take it out and look at it. If you look at St. Pierre, it's a little tiny island off the south coast of Newfoundland, population 5,000 or something like that. I should say that until this recent meeting, by and large St. Pierre and Miquelon have been pretty supportive of Canadian positions in NAFO. This last meeting took a bit of a detour in that regard. I wasn't impressed with their performance. I think we have to take it up with them.

My view, which I've expressed to the Government of Newfoundland and Labrador, is that our provincial government has a role to play there. St. Pierre really needs the cooperation of Newfoundland to be able to function. The ferry goes through Fortune. Coincidentally, about 300 or 400 of our members work in the plants there. For transportation, for medical care, for a whole host of things, they need cooperation, because they're a little tiny enclave there in the ocean that would have great difficulty operating without it.

I'm not suggesting we threaten them. I think we should simply sit down with them and say that we have a very serious problem and we want them to know we're contemplating supporting action by Canada on the ports and would regard it as a very unfriendly action by St. Pierre and Miquelon if all of a sudden we found they were offering an alternative. In the meantime, they don't have the freezing capacity, the infrastructure, and so on now that they would need to be a genuine alternative. So I think we can deal with that one, and I think we should.

The Chair: Thank you, Mr. McCurdy.

I believe that's it for questions. Oh, Peter has one very short one.

Mr. Peter Stoffer: In terms of the observer reports, how many observers are on the ships?

Mr. Earle McCurdy: There's one per vessel.

Mr. Peter Stoffer: But the vessels fish 24-7, more or less, don't they?

Mr. Earle McCurdy: Yes.

Mr. Peter Stoffer: Thank you.

The Chair: Thank you, Peter.

I have two things, Earle. On Bill C-29, I think there are only two of us around the table here who were in Ottawa when we passed that bill. So I'll ask the clerk to get a copy of that bill, and ask DFO to provide us with either a written briefing or an oral briefing on the options that may be used under Bill C-29 relative to this issue.

Secondly, you suggested--and it's a good suggestion--that prior to June, we as a government should set some criteria that would allow the vessels to use our ports. Could you send us a list of what you think the criteria should be that may or may not be implemented? Could you do that by letter? Then we can follow up from there.

Mr. Earle McCurdy: Yes, I'd be glad to do that.

I might say on that point that I think it would be useful to have other heads brought to bear on that. If the government said it's looking at that, there could be open input from a variety of sources, certainly a cross-section of provincial, federal, and industry people. I don't think you'd need a large group, but if you had a kind of working group of half a dozen or so, it would probably be half a day's work to come up with a good, solid list of criteria. I'd certainly be glad to make a first brush at it.

The other thing I might add, which just occurred to me, is that one very clear message that Canada could send to the Faroe Islands on their disgraceful conduct is to list them as an offending country under Bill C-29. The way Bill C-29 is worded, Canada gives itself the power to act against listed obnoxious countries. The Europeans screamed blue murder that they were exceeding their jurisdiction, but Canada did it anyway at the time. At the moment it lists the non-contracting parties, and I'm not sure if it's the EU, or Spain and Portugal. I just don't recall. They're listed as being kind of offending countries that are subject to action. If we added the Faroe Islands to that list, it would be a very clear message to them to not mess around like that. But there's no point adding them to the list, unless we're prepared to take action against them.

The Faroe Islands--for God's sake, most people in the world don't even know where they are. They're a tiny dot way north of Scotland somewhere. With a population of 37,000, they're going to come in and fish way over the quota in a stock that's 83% Canadian allocated, and we're going to sit back and say, geez, it's too bad what they're doing.

À (1045)

The Chair: We get your point.

Peter.

Mr. Peter Stoffer: On a point of order, we seem to be going around EU and all these other countries. Is there anybody who can name the offending countries? Who are they?

Mr. Earle McCurdy: Spain is the worst. Portugal--there's no bargain. The Scandinavians put themselves forward as civilized people, but some of them are acting in a way.... Certainly the Icelanders have been a damned nuisance in NAFO for the last several years, and the Faroe Islands' conduct is disgraceful, just to name a few.

Russia is Russia. Russia's tricky to deal with. You have to kind of lean on the Japanese to get their vote. The critical vote in 1995 that gave rise to the whole Estai war was from the Japanese. A clear message was delivered to them that if they didn't cooperate on that vote, there were going to be very clear consequences.

You have to be in there. First of all, you have to make the levers, through things like the rules for use of ports, and so on. Then we have to be prepared to use them. The old lever we used to have in NAFO--and I think it worked like that in ICNAF, but I wasn't there myself--was to use a bit of fish to sweeten the pot. At one time, if you got the Russians onside with fish, they could whip about half a dozen votes into shape pretty quickly.

That world has changed. In fact, we have the disadvantage because these wannabe Europeans--Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, and Poland, and I'm not sure about Ukraine--are dying to join the EU, and will conduct themselves accordingly, when push comes to shove, in terms of votes. So we're up against them.

The Chair: So you know where their support's going to go.

Earle, on the letter and the list, we're not saying they should be definitive, but we need a place to start. That's why I asked for those suggestions.

Thanks very much for the presentation, Mr. McCurdy and Mr. Cribb.

We'll take a five-minute washroom break and come back to Fisheries Products International.

Mr. Earle McCurdy: Could I just add one point?

The Chair: One last point, go ahead.

Mr. Earle McCurdy: Thank you very much for the opportunity.

I meant to speak to Loyola's comment. I'd be delighted if the committee were successful in getting an emergency debate on the floor of the House of Commons on this issue. I think it would be tremendous.

The issue in Canso just highlights our problem. We essentially have squabbling between different regions of the country over who's going to catch a bit of undersized minimal-value redfish, when we should have an abundance of commercially viable fish that gives a living to all those traditional communities, so we're not fighting with one another over the scraps. That's our problem.

The Chair: Okay, thank you very much.

We'll be back here in five minutes.

À (1045)

(1050)

The Chair Could we come back to order? We've got to keep pushing because we've got some extra witnesses. Could members come back to the table?

Mr. Andrews, from FPI, welcome. We appreciate you coming on a Saturday morning.

À (1055)

Mr. Ray Andrews (Director, Industrial and Government Relations, Fishery Products International Limited): Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.

I would like to welcome the members of the committee. Thank you for coming.

My approach will be basically one of complementing the two previous speakers. I didn't hear the others. Certainly in the context of the union, which represents most of the employees with our company, and FANL, of which we are a member, I hope it will complement.

We are an offshore groundfish company, historically. In preparation, to put this in perspective, I think the key focus I would like to give the presentation is the need not just to conserve in the broadest sense, but to really get on a track that helps rebuild the resource. I think that's an important part.

I'll try not to repeat much of what Alastair or Earle have said. I do look forward to questions and answers, because I think they provide the enlightenment that in many cases we don't get when we focus on a formal presentation. I'd like to put a human face on the fish issue and the international community. I would really like to focus on the south coast of Newfound, because that's where, historically, the offshore groundfish fishery was prosecuted from, and that's where it has been decimated, and that's where we hold on by our fingernails to the three plants that are left on the south coast.

Of course FPI is an offshore company, as I said. We've got three groundfish plants. Depending on how you do the counting, let's say there are 1,200 or 1,300 people in our three plants, in total, plus, as Ches Cribb has indicated, the 200-plus trawlermen who would be working with us and the spinoff that comes from it.

I would really like to focus on flatfish, because I think it helps me put a focus on the broad issue. Excuse me if I ramble a little, which is personal rather than corporate, because I've spent my career in the three levels of government, federal, provincial, and territorial, totally in fisheries. So excuse me if I drift a little. I have a little slide presentation, which may help not just the members, but some of the people who care to focus it a little more.

What I'd like to do is make a very brief introduction and then say that what we have is an urgent requirement not just to improve NAFO in a strict sense, because that's the agency we now deal with, but to improve fisheries management in the broadest and in the most global sense. I have a practical lesson from Canada regarding two of the most important NAFO-regulated stocks. Some of you people may not be as familiar with the terminology of 3L and 3LNO as some of us, but at least you'll know where I'm coming from. I'd like to focus on yellowtail flounder in particular and American plaice, which was so adequately addressed by the previous speakers. I think I'd like to really focus on the benefits of a rebuilt yellowtail stock and the potential benefits for rebuilding American plaice.

There are three areas in which to make recommendations on dealing with the crucial problems we now have of foreign overfishing, and the first is that we do have an opportunity or should make an opportunity to improve the NAFO process. Second, we should really look seriously at coastal state management or custodial management, whichever you want to use. I suppose that you would in an ideal world, as do the rest of the people who have spoken, like to extend jurisdiction in the pure sense and take full control of the nose, tail, and Flemish Cap.

On improving NAFO--as I said, I don't want to repeat, so if I'm a bit brief here, it's not that I disagree with anything that's been said, I just want to give you people time to focus a little more--there has to be a collective, concentrated national government approach. In my humble opinion, and I have been in Ottawa as a political adviser for a few years, something cannot really take legs and move or grow fins and swim without the support of the Prime Minister, the Prime Minister's Office, and the most senior levels in government departments; that's a given. Second, it cannot really move forward in a substantive manner without the full support of the industry and all participants, wherever they might be, from Nunavut to the south coast of Newfoundland.

The suggested plan is first and foremost one, I think, of trying to do a NAFO improvement. In all fairness to people's thinking, we cannot disregard and throw out something that can potentially be fixed to a degree where it's much better than what we've seen in the past. One of the things we definitely need is to make a formal, transparent list--and I'm simplifying--of what we really want NAFO to do. There are certain things that can be done, and let's see them in a transparent manner. Let's put them up and let the public judge whether or not they are useful and practical.

There should be benchmarks for doing this, but the one thing I really would stress is that there must be timelines. It's very good to make a good, exhaustive list of what we want done and how things can be improved, but whatever we do--and I stress this to you as committee people--let's put some timelines around doing it. Nobody has the magic bullet in terms of issues or time, but collectively we can come to it, and I think that would be important.

The contingency plan: obviously, as a first step, if it doesn't work with the clear list of where we're going and with the focus for the timelines, then there has to be a notice of withdrawal. If you can't work and fix something, let's formalize when we're going to call a halt to that and move to another level. Beyond improving NAFO's effectiveness, we have to really think seriously about coastal state management, and I'm going to come to that when I get to rebuilding American plaice.

Let's look quickly at yellowtail and American plaice. I put them up for two important reasons. Number one is their importance in terms of percentages. It's very clear that what we're talking about is two stocks the international community--not Canada--has designated as 98% Canadian. There are no other two stocks I'm aware of in any jurisdiction that would get close to the 98% level. Why do we need a big input from outside this country in that sense?

The other important point I'd like to make is the percentage that applies to this company and the people who work at those three plants. In the case of yellowtail, for the full international tack, we get 88% in round numbers of all the yellowtail designated in the northwest Atlantic. On the second count, American plaice, we get as a company for our employees at our plants 80% of that total.

Á (1100)

The next slide says it all about yellowtail. In the case of yellowtail, which has been mentioned here today, if you look back historically into 1983 and move it forward, it's a very good graph, because it's a steady stock. It's a moratorium or non-directed fishery. And in case you're not aware, there is a very good success story in yellowtail, because when you look at the right-hand side, you see that for the last four years it's been brought back almost to its historic level of catch and TACs.

For yellowtail, just to summarize, I think maybe a few points would be good. We had a three-year real moratorium. And when I say that, I think we can honestly say that there was not nearly as much illegal directed fishing on this stock as there was on American plaice. The numbers again speak for themselves.

We have a tremendous problem, as Ches Cribb has pointed out, with our skippers and our trawler people in trying to avoid other species of bycatch and small yellowtail to fish this total properly. Look at the TACs: 4,000 tonnes in 1998, and by 2001, and including this year, we've moved it up to 13,000 tonnes. I submit that because of a lot of Canadian cooperative work between governments and industry that has been a success story. Hence there's something positive to say. The biomass is well above the mid-eighties. We decimated these stocks, and the example is cooperation and we're continuing to expand our survey and study activity in cooperation with the federal government.

For yellowtail, all I can say on that slide is we do everything by the book to the best of our ability within the Canadian context and the NAFO context. It's 100% observer, 100% dockside, small fish protocol, bycatch limits, grid management, spawning area closures, and separator grates to remove the small and unwanted.

Let's look at American plaice for the opposite. It says it all. Some 50,000 tonnes for 30 years was the average TAC catch if you mix and match the two. Let's round it out: 50,000 tonnes was where we're at. Remember, it's 98% Canadian. And remember the second point: 80% goes to the people who work for this company. I think if you want a story, it says it all there. And of course if you extend it out to 2001, you will see there's still no TAC and it's still an increasing fishery.

The next slide gets to the detail. American plaice in 3LNO was the largest flatfish fishery in the northwest Atlantic. For 30 years the average was 50,000 tonnes, and the moratorium began in 1995 and we're now into year eight of the moratorium. The only two things we're sure of is that there is a certain amount of increase in that stock, but the bulk of the catch is an illegal directed fishery by the foreigners. That's the simplest way I can say it.

Despite the moratorium, we are now at in excess of 5,000 tonnes. Some small percentage of that is indeed Canadian and this company, because we do the best we can, but we still have a bycatch.

The last part I would like to read into the record, because I think it says it all. When we talk about Newfoundlanders and Canadians, Labradorians, and fish plant employees and companies, just move away to at least one objective commentary on this. NAFO's scientific council reported it is concerned that catches of American plaice have increased substantially since 1995, such that fishing mortality is now close to our management system that we generally accept.

In doing that, the scientific council is concerned that much of this catch is not truly bycatch, that it's occurring as a result of directed fishing. This council of international scientists said this. That was not a Canadian statement. That is an international statement on that fact: any catches will impede.

On the American plaice story, I think you could say that our experience with yellowtail as a company with our employees on our trawlers has demonstrated that what we now have before us is a yellowtail story of a turnaround completely by Canadian trawlermen almost entirely with this company.

Á (1105)

The second thing we want to say is if we have good and conservative estimates of where we're going with American plaice, as an example, if we had just 50% of the historical average from that resource going into our plants, we would make our three plants on the south coast of Newfoundland practically year-round employment opportunities. That's just one stock at 50% of what it used to be. If that doesn't give you a real human, south coast Newfoundland face on this fish story, I can't think of a better one.

The next one is to very simply say to you that those figures represent 50 million pounds in round fish of all groundfish going through our three south coast plants. Remember, that's 22,0000 tonnes. All we want back to double that is 50% of the historical average of American plaice, and we will have done all of that just on one stock. This year we project to be at 50 million pounds.

Let me say it this way. At Marystown, these are the weeks we now work at our groundfish plants, unfortunately. In doing that, Marystown, Fortune Bay, or Harbour Breton could literally get doubled just by rebuilding to 50% of norm.

A positive approach to doing this is that yellowtail and American plaice are 97% and 98.5% Canadian. If we can take those two stocks and rebuild the second one to even half its level, I don't have to give you any more than the statistics on the graph and the numbers that I mentioned earlier.

The point is that Canada should have a much greater role, if not in all of the stocks out there, in two in which it has 98% of the stock it should have a much greater place to play. I've basically said that we can use the example of yellowtail--which is Canadian FPI and its employees, by and large--to demonstrate, not just to ourselves, because we've done it very well, but to the rest of Canada and to the international community that we collectively, as employees of this company, trawlermen, and as governments here, can do something right because we have the example in yellowtail.

In summary, there is no question that we have to try to improve something that can be fixed or should be fixed: NAFO. But let's get it straight. We have to get to a transparent process in which everybody knows what the current state is, what the targets are to do things better, but more importantly, what the timelines are to get there.

Coastal state management, to me, is the natural follow-up even to a successful NAFO. It may be that we have to go that way, or should go that way. The success we've had with yellowtail has been before you. A replication of that success story is possible in American plaice with the results I've indicated. With a collective effort, I think we can do it. And more importantly, could I be bold and suggest almost on a personal basis, as opposed to a corporate basis, that this is one stock we might be able to use as a real test case in promoting or trying to do Canadian custodial management. It's 90% ours by international agreement. We don't have to worry about that. That's a given.

I would like to thank you for your attention. I will try, to the best of my ability, to answer some of the questions, having been involved in NAFO for a few years, and the fishery for the last forty, should I say. Thank you.

Á (1110)

The Chair: Thank you very much. We certainly welcome your experience and appreciate your presentation, Mr. Andrews.

Mr. Lunney first.

Mr. James Lunney: Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Mr. Andrews, thank you for a very thorough and interesting presentation.

I have just one question. Maybe I missed something here, or maybe I'm a little slow on the uptake, but why is it that our procedures have been very effective and we're seeing these stocks of yellowtail flounder come back and we've been such a dismal failure in the American plaice? How can it work for one species and not the other?

Mr. Ray Andrews: I think primarily the yellowtail has been inside the Canadian zone, to a large degree. Secondly, there was not a large interest in it. It was such a dedicated Canadian activity and there were some special rules established within the process to allow us to move it forward.

The key is this: once we got the opportunity, Canadian-Newfoundland trawlermen and the company got together with the government and said that whatever we do, since the only people who can benefit are us and the only real big losers are us, let's do it right together. That has been the real plus. The others are not in quite the same category; it's a little more difficult.

Á (1115)

Mr. James Lunney: So the American plaice is a straddling stock. It goes into the nose and tail. Is that the issue? Is that why they're...?

Mr. Ray Andrews: Yes, it's more that way. There's no question about it.

But in the meantime, I guess the point to be made is that if the European community especially, and others, saw or fully accepted that this is a 98% Canadian stock, and there was some leverage or encouragement to try to do it right rather than them fish it illegally while they fish for other things under guise, I think we could really do the same thing. That's the way I'll answer you.

Mr. James Lunney: Thank you.

The Chair: Monsieur Roy.

[Translation]

Mr. Jean-Yves Roy: Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Welcome, Mr. Andrews and thank you for your presentation. In your presentation, you spoke of criteria which should be very clear in order to judge NAFO's effectiveness, and of setting a timeline. Everybody tells us that it is urgent. NAFO, as I mentioned earlier to other witnesses, has existed for 25 years.

According to the way you see things, when you say we have to set a timeline, what time limit do you have in mind? Is it three years, five years, six years? Bottom line, my question is the following. To what extent must Canada continue to participate in an organization that is totally ineffectual, in which it invests 50 percent of the costs and which, we recognize, does not work, unfortunately? I agree that we have to establish criteria, but the criteria must be very precise and it must be done very quickly because, bottom line, the situation is very serious.

We recognize here that in Newfoundland and Labrador, the situation is such that there is practically no industry left. If it continues this way for another five or six years, will the industry still exist? That's my question. I agree with you that we need criteria for judging NAFO, that we must be very precise, but I think there is some urgency.

I asked this question of a witness yesterday. In your opinion, are we not now, finally, at the point of no return?

[English]

The Chair: Mr. Andrews.

Mr. Ray Andrews: Thank you, sir.

In a very general sense, first I would say this: We are much nearer the short term, and in my humble opinion, your suggestion of three years might not be a bad target if we collectively agree, because, after all, I think we should do that. But I'm with you in the sense that we have had lots of time to do things, and we haven't done them the proper way. Let's put up a timeline for the final point, which is when we leave this. I would reiterate what Mr. McCurdy and Mr. O'Rielly have said, that there then has to be step two or the backup plan. But in the short term I'm with you.

On the second count, the things we could do could be agreed upon quickly. If only those people we've dealt with over the years had even a little bent towards conservation, sustainability and rebuilding, I think we would make considerable progress. But in the meantime, let's say there was a genuine effort to do that, and let's take the example that I put forward. If they would say to us that there's a genuine commitment to do it, and Canada, it's 98% yours in a couple of those stocks, why don't we use them as the test case? If there are results and we can do things better, we have an opportunity to move it on, because in some of the other stocks, as Alastair pointed out, turbot is at the point now where, no matter how much it rebuilds, Canada only gets, by negotiation, 37% of the stock, which is directly off our shores. So we have to do that.

The other point is--and I said it yesterday, because I admit some guilt--I pulled my files the day before yesterday to look at the last six years of NAFO meetings. Listen, it's very difficult in 2002 to go to Denmark and say things are terrible if collectively the Government of Canada--which I was a part of, by the way, at one time, and did much the same thing--said things are not quite that bad or they are relatively successful.

There are two messages here. We've been saying for a while that you guys are great guys and we're publicly saying you are; then on the other hand we get to 2002 and say you're terrible--look how bad you are. Now we've got to take this two years maybe or three years to bring NAFO into line and issue an edict that says Canada has no part of it once we've gone beyond that timeline with those specific objectives.

Á (1120)

The Chair: Mr. Roy.

[Translation]

Mr. Jean-Yves Roy: To end, Mr. Andrews, I also asked this question of other witnesses. Would you be prepared to participate actively, as a producer, in an activity, that is, the defence of the interests of the whole industry here, in Newfoundland, as part of a concerted action?

[English]

Mr. Ray Andrews: Absolutely, yes, sir, we would welcome the opportunity. And could I be even bold and suggest that as a company and as an offshore groundfish activity, we would bring to the table both the demonstrated success story that our trawlermen and employees did, along with the explanation of and the potential for doing it over again in another stock and carrying it forward. Yes--more than happy.

The Chair: Thank you, Mr. Roy.

Mr. Cuzner.

Mr. Rodger Cuzner: I know it's tough to get the exact science on anything outside the 200-mile marker. You're certainly guessing at a lot of numbers. But in your best estimation, how much of the resource is being harvested illegally, through bycatch, which, as you have identified, really is directed? What's your best estimation as to how much of the resource is being taken annually?

Mr. Ray Andrews: Well, again, it's very difficult to give a precise number. I would agree with that.

I will just take two examples. I think Mr. O'Rielly used the fact that 10,000 plus tonnes of moratoria species are being harvested. I think that one is a good one. But let me back it up and take out of that a moratorium stock, which is American plaice. I think it would be instructive if I very quickly told you that this stock has gone theoretically from a zero, to show what I call the illegal activity, and it's gone up by 400 tonnes, 1,400 tonnes, 2,500 tonnes, and for the last two years has reached 5,000 tonnes.

If you're looking at it without generalizing, you take that one and say here's the example of pure illegal activity. And the numbers are there in the international fora to demonstrate it, because they gave us the numbers; they didn't really come from elsewhere.

If you take it in a broad sense and you throw in shrimp and you throw in the other stocks that are out there, sir, I couldn't really honestly hazard a guess. But if you say 10,000 under moratoria and you double that to throw in the ones that are not, somewhere in that neighbourhood is where I would be. I'd be at least there, because as I said, we have the moratoria stuff that we're aware of and we don't like.

The Chair: Do we have anywhere where those numbers are documented that's accessible to the committee? Alan, do you know? I don't think we do.

Do you know where we can get those numbers that are documented in a scientific fashion that we can utilize as a committee?

Mr. Ray Andrews: Well, the only real source, I think, would be the best estimates that Canada has at DFO. I am not certain that you could get them elsewhere. That's the simple answer. I don't think you could, sir.

The Chair: Okay. So we'll have to go to....

I was just looking through, which partly related to McCurdy's presentation, the information that DFO gave us, or Pat Chamut. It was the proposal that the EU opposed to the Greenland halibut depth restrictor. What happened on the other species? Were there proposals put forward on them or not, in particular, American plaice?

Á (1125)

Mr. Ray Andrews: Yes, there have been specific targets, objectives, proposals, and indeed other conservation measures to deal with other stocks, most of which haven't really had a fair hearing and certainly haven't had a positive response. But the turbot one I think is very instructive, in the sense that there were two things around the turbot. We know where they can be fished literally “clean”, as we call it, meaning without much bycatch, which has been fully demonstrated and presented. And you say we don't like it, so we vote it down.

Again, folks, American plaice, because that's where the target really is.... But the really galling part of it is that when you try to do that, then you're sitting there with scientific advice saying 40,000 maximum for Greenland halibut or turbot, and you get an introduction by another country that says, could we please ignore the scientific advice again, and could we not raise that by 10%? And most people line up, as Earle McCurdy said, and say yes, put it up to 44; it's a Canadian stock, we have 63% of it as foreigners; they only have 37%, so what's the difference? That's the kind of stuff that's really galling at those sessions.

The Chair: Just so we're all clear, then, the Greenland halibut depths restriction was mainly put in place to protect American plaice, right?

Mr. Ray Andrews: Yes: to do conservation generally with any stocks there you would fish at a higher depth. In these cases it was clearly demonstrated by both fishers and by the scientific community; we had to have a blessing from a scientific community to move forward a reasonable management measure. The sum total of the findings was that if you fish at 700 metres or less, you know that your target is going to be Greenland halibut or turbot and you know your catch is going to be primarily there, but if you go back up to the other depths, the answer is a higher catch of American plaice, yellowtail, or whatever else--cod--happens to be there. You're right, sir.

The Chair: Thank you very much, Mr. Andrews.

Mr. Wappel.

Mr. Tom Wappel: Maybe this is a point of order. You asked the question, where would we get this information? In slide 6 of the Canadian presentation, when they presented NAFO, they specifically said that there was a 5,000-tonne excess of American plaice in 3LNO. One presumes that, having made that allegation in Denmark, they have backup documentation for it, so we could get it from Mr. Chamut, presumably.

The Chair: Thanks, Mr. Wappel.

Mr. Stoffer.

Mr. Peter Stoffer: Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman.

Thank you, sir, for your presentation. I thought it was extremely well done.

The reality is, we're talking about people in those communities. If Mr. Hann, the mayor of Burgeo, and Mr. Morgan of the rural rights group...and Mr. Matthews knows all too well the number of people leaving his constituency on almost a daily basis. Do we have two or three years, in your estimate?

Mr. Ray Andrews: We have to make an assumption that we have a couple of years, yes, to fix this if it's possible. While it may be rough in those communities and we may have great difficulty even maintaining what we're doing, we still need a little time to fix it, because surely--I'm just thinking out loud--after what was done in Denmark there might be some effort to try to correct things a bit, either from the countries or from the NAFO process, bearing in mind it's only September. A few months away and we're into another year.

I would have to be, again, an optimist and say we have the time or we must make the time to fix and then to move on. But I'm still back to the gentleman here, Mr. Roy, that it's two or three years, not five to ten. That's absolutely certain.

Mr. Peter Stoffer: You also said in your summary that you must have meaningful progress at NAFO's annual meeting by September. What happens in October? I'm getting the feeling that we're asking Spain, Portugal, and the Faroe Islands, the so-called noted countries with infractions, to change their evil ways. I just don't have that much confidence that they will. What happens in October if they don't? What do we do then?

Mr. Ray Andrews: Well, I think getting to September is critical, and so is getting there with the actual plan and transparency that takes us there to do those things with that timeline, as I suggested earlier.

After that, sir, I am convinced that a major national attempt will have to be made to not just be looking at improving NAFO. If we don't accomplish a lot there, as others have said, we should almost be into plan B in a general sense. With the embarrassment to those countries of the Denmark meeting, with what Canada presented as observer status--which, I must add, was very well researched and applied--if that doesn't bring results and if a couple of things that have been mentioned here this morning, including reference to ports and things of this nature.... If we go to Spain and that doesn't bring major positive steps forward, I think we have to be already in mode B.

Let's go out and do something that demonstrates custodial management or coastal stake management and control. If we can't do it in everything, why don't we take a timeline and a specific to do it? I'm just harping on this one because it's our employees, our company, this province.

Take yellowtail, and American plaice. It's 97% and 98% Canadian by international agreement. It's not us saying we have 97% and 98%; it's the international community for decades telling us that's what we have. So let's go out and do that one. We don't have to do it all. As I said, we have a famous tendency in many cases to do nothing or everything. Well, let's take the middle of the road. After September, if we haven't reached some positive, meaningful steps forward, let's do something realistic. It's Canadian, and the countries of the world will say you're right, it's yours, go do it.

Á (1130)

Mr. Peter Stoffer: You said it would have to go to the Prime Minister's level. You're right, and I believe the committee would agree. Has your company made a formal application to the Prime Minister to address this issue?

Mr. Ray Andrews: No, we have had other fish to fry.

Some hon. members: Oh, oh!

Mr. Peter Stoffer: Good for you. Right on.

Will you make that presentation?

Mr. Ray Andrews: Yes. We've had considerable debate about certain FPI activities, which concluded, I hope, in large measure this week. We would certainly be prepared not just to do that, but also, to go back to the other question, to get on board and help out in any way we can to help do it.

Mr. Peter Stoffer: Thank you.

The Chair: Thank you, Mr. Andrews.

Mr. Hearn.

Mr. Loyola Hearn: Again, thank you, Ray, for a great presentation. What we're seeing is that all the presentations that are made by quality individuals representing quality organizations are basically saying the same thing. This is not a bunch all going off on their own way. We have a major issue here, which hopefully we can all focus on collectively.

I have a couple of questions, Ray. You mentioned the three FPI plants and the effect on them of the loss of resource. Just to give the committee a bit of background on what it was like in the good old days, I guess you're quite familiar with how many plants FPI did operate and the number of communities or individuals involved to show the effect of the loss of our cod stocks and the decline in flatfish. That just puts a human face on the effect on this province of the complete mismanagement of the resource that we have, perhaps our own mismanagement of what we had and the overfishing outside the limit.

Mr. Ray Andrews: In a nutshell, Mr. Hearn, I think what you have to look at now is the current number we have in the processing side. That's probably the best example. We're at about 15% or 20% of what would be some kind of a normal, not even full-year, activity.

There are 1,500 or 1,300 who now work on what I call a half-year basis, for want of clarity. In most of the south coast plants, there were many more, not just from this company, which I think is another point you are raising. If you go from Port Union and Trepassey all the way over to Burgeo, where Mayor Hann is from, there were literally two or three times this amount, almost on a full-time basis. Mr. Matthews would know this better.

So it's that kind of number, down into hundreds, multiplied into thousands, and half-years or less into mostly years of 40, 45, or whatever the number of weeks was. That's basically where it's at, sir. Like I said, the number of plants that are lost and gone and transferred elsewhere is bigger, much bigger, than what's left in the remnant of FPI right now.

Á (1135)

Mr. Loyola Hearn: This gives us an example of what has happened.

We've probably touched on this a little, but in many areas of the world--and we've certainly had an example of it here in Canada, particularly Newfoundland--the effectiveness of environmental groups is obvious. Certainly we saw this with the seal fishery. We only have six or seven million seals that have again wreaked complete and utter disaster on our stock, but we saw what a group--a small group, originally--of environmentalists can do. We see the same thing with the pine marten, a few very small animals on the west coast of Newfoundland. We see it in P.E.I. with different groups.

Here we have the destruction of nature--not just one species, but many species--affecting the whole livelihood of a country, not just part of a country. But we haven't seen the environmentalists in action on this. If we could muster these people on our side, rather than having them against us as in the past, what kind of effect do you think this would have?

Mr. Ray Andrews: It could be quite effective. If we have a concerted or collective effort to get the information out--and there's probably a difference between information and what I call pure public relations.... I'm convinced many people don't know a lot of the story. But if we had this information package on a timely basis and what was happening or not happening in the NAFO process was somewhat more transparent....

I'll give you an example of information. How many foreign boats are operating and catching approximately how much fish on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis off our coast? There was a time when this was readily available public information. Maybe this would be a start.

Then if we build into real communications and public relations, I am convinced that the greens--the environmentalists--and concerned citizens in whatever group they may be in could be our biggest allies in this. But it has to be a collective effort starting with good information, transparency in our governments, and then the mobilization of forces to move it forward.

The Chair: Thank you, Mr. Hearn.

Does anyone else have any questions?

I have two questions, one following off of Mr. Hearn's. You said this information used to be readily available. When did this stop?

Mr. Ray Andrews: Everything has tapered down over the last decade. There was a time when we had a general information package about what was going on. I used the last decade as an example of a time when there has been a lack of real hard information.

The Chair: The other thing you said earlier, Ray, is that in the last six years of NAFO meetings we've been saying to a certain extent that you've been great guys, and now we're taking a 180-degree turn. Is this as a result of the reduced fishing days and number of vessels after 1995, that there was some improvement and then it started to deteriorate? Could you expand on this a little more?

Mr. Ray Andrews: This might have had something to do with it. If you look at 1995, regardless of political stripe or attachment to the industry, the 1995 decision on activity pertaining to the Estai was a positive move. There were some very positive benefits. But what got away from us--and I'm back to this transparency and availability of information issue--was that after this, when things started to deteriorate, we, as an interested public, did not really know exactly what was happening. When the public doesn't know and doesn't have good information, there's not much concern.

If you look at 1997--and I'll quote the September headline--“Canada Welcomes Progress at NAFO Annual Meeting”. In 1998, “NAFO Confirms 100% Observer Program”. This is positive stuff; these are the headlines. The next year, “Dhaliwal Announces Canada Successful in Pushing for Conservation-Based Management”. In 1999-2000, “Canada Announces Progress at the NAFO Annual Meeting”. In 2002, “Canada Disappointed with Outcome of NAFO Meeting”.

The Chair: That's good information for us to have. Thanks very much.

Are there any last points you want to raise, Mr. Andrews, yourself, or anyone else around the table?

Thank you very much, then, for your presentation. There was a lot of information there. Again, thank you on behalf of the committee.

Á (1140)

Mr. Ray Andrews: Thank you very much.

The Chair: We'll not take a break. We'll go to the Fisheries Crisis Alliance, Gus Etchegary.

For those people who are here in the audience, when we're done with this presentation, there are enough sandwiches and coffee and tea next door for us all who are here. You're welcome to join us, and you can bend a member's ear while we're doing that.

Thank you, Mr. Etchegary. Welcome.

Mr. Gus Etchegary (Spokesperson, Fisheries Crisis Alliance): Thank you very much for the opportunity to be here, Mr. Chairman and members. I really appreciate the opportunity, and so does the group of people associated with our alliance.

Quite frankly, I was here yesterday and listened to the presentations. I must confess that I went home last night and, although I'm a lousy typist, I redid my presentation. I don't want to repeat the same things over and over.

I'd like to begin by saying that I totally disagree with two of the speakers this morning, the last one and the first one, and I partially agree with Mr. McCurdy in his presentation. I would like to also say to you that I don't think we would be here, quite honestly, talking about this revelation in Denmark except for the fact that three months prior to the meeting in Denmark people in higher places in Ottawa were told that some of these practices, which we have been aware of for fifty years, were going to get a bit more exposure because there are other ways of getting this information than through NAFO--and fortunately, there are.

The reason they made the big hullabaloo in Denmark was largely due to the fact that they did not want to be embarrassed by information that would be forthcoming otherwise. Quite honestly, two ministers of cabinet were aware of the information that's in the document in September, as, by the way, have been previous ministers over the last fifty years. Therefore, I have great difficulty sitting here.

I went to my first law of the sea meeting in 1958. I came into the fishery, by the way, in 1945, ten years before Canada discovered the value of the Newfoundland fishery. And I might say to you, because you may or may not know, it was not until 1954 before Canada officially took responsibility for--was alleged to have taken responsibility for--the management of the resource. And by 1955, I might say to you.... I was listening yesterday to Mr. Allister, the mayor of Burgeo. My first job in 1945 was to install a diesel electric plant in a place called Isle aux Morts, a second one in a place called Burgeo, and a third one in a place called Burin, where I eventually wound up being the plant manager for the next seven or eight or nine years, which were the greatest years of my life, in a way, until I met my wife.

The fact of the matter is, what has been going on here.... I brought these charts along, and I would honestly hope that these would be indelibly etched into your minds as you go about the business of trying to grapple with the problems we're facing here in Newfoundland and trying to transmit them to the Government of Canada.

I listened to the previous speaker talk about plaice. We didn't negotiate, nor did the international nations negotiate with us on our share of the plaice. We established a historic right to it by putting vessels in there and fishing to the extent of 97% of a quota. I say “the established quota” because, I have to say to you, the Spaniards with their pair fishing operation, which you may or may not be familiar with, which is one huge net towed between two trawlers, caught more than the quota as a bycatch.

If anybody questions this, I will be delighted to give them the background. I can also refer you to a lawyer in Ottawa who is in another department now, but who served as a legal officer when I, as chairman of an industrial committee from Canada, sat down and negotiated with an industrial group in the fishery from Spain. But they actually took 50% bycatch of American plaice--and by the way, it was far above 50,000 tonnes.

Yellowtails have escaped only because they are within the 200-mile limit. Otherwise, you wouldn't be looking at that little graph showing a recovery, which, by the way, is a recovery to 50% of the potential quota of yellowtails--50% of the quota.

The other chart has to do with northern cod. On the left-hand side it shows you, in 1962, the spawning biomass, codfish seven years and older, at 1,600,000 tonnes. Add to that the under seven years, down to say three years, and you're talking about an estimated three million tonnes.

Ladies and gentlemen, today there are scientists in the Newfoundland region who will tell you that we are almost at a point where cod is an endangered species. Please understand this. We're talking here three million tonnes, and today we have a total quota on the south coast of Newfoundland and in the gulf of something like 20,000 tonnes. Isn't that enough?

I am going to make some reference to my notes, Mr. Chairman. I would like to come back afterwards, of course, and get involved in some of the other issues, but I would like to read this into the record.

It was about three years ago that Mr. Sandeman, who was a noted scientist, and I sat down before the Commons fishery committee. We were there for three hours. Mr. Easter, you remember.

Á (1145)

We concentrated on two subjects. One was the considerable slash by the federal government in the science department. It was devastating. Secondly, we talked about the blatant overfishing practices of NAFO countries outside 200 miles. These were the two subjects. Unfortunately, not a single positive step has been taken to deal with either of those situations. As a matter of fact, it has worsened. So we're going to stay in NAFO for three years to rectify it?

Scientists today are unable to provide the accurate data and scientific information to fisheries management to move along, to determine what they should be doing. There is not sufficient information. I repeat that for you, because it's so important. We've lost people; we've lost some really good scientists who had enormous corporate knowledge of our fisheries. They're gone. They're gone as a result of slashing the science budget, and nothing has been done to improve that situation.

NAFO continues to mismanage. I don't want to go into all the things that have been said, but ten days after the NAFO meeting in Denmark a Faeroese trawler, which Mr. McCurdy referred to, was caught red-handed just outside the 200-mile zone in 3L. He was catching shrimp at a rate someone estimated to be somewhere in the vicinity of 25 to 30 tonnes. Anyway, they were catching sufficient shrimp to match their freezing capacity. His log, which was viewed by the same people who boarded, showed he was fishing on the Flemish Cap. So we're going to wait for three years to deal with it.

What applies to the Scandinavians in the shrimp fishery, and their continued overfishing and their abuse of everything imaginable within the NAFO structure, applies to those in the NAFO group, particularly European Community countries, who are fishing groundfish.

I was listening to Mr. McCurdy again this morning, and Mr. Andrews, talking about plaice. If you ever go to Madrid, Lisbon, or any of the cities on the Iberian Peninsula, on a Sunday go into a family restaurant and be served a fish dinner. You'll get a plate with every conceivable kind of fish on it. But on top of it all you will find a little American plaice coming from the nurseries for American plaice, which are just outside--I have another chart I was going to show you of the nose and tail of the Grand Banks--just outside the nose and tail of the Grand Banks.

They're going to continue to do it, Mr. Chairman, for the simple reason that anyone who has real experience in the fishing industry--and I'm talking about operating experience, understanding the harvesting as well as the processing and the marketing, understands the harvesting and the practices of foreign fisherman.... And I can assure you there are many around this province who know as much about it as I do, and certainly a lot of fishermen, a lot of deep sea fishermen who know this quite well.

Á (1150)

When a foreign owner in any of those foreign fishing ports, distant water fishermen who come 3,000 or 4,000 miles--some of them from the Baltic states, Estonia, Latvia, or Lithuania--when they come 3,000, 4,000, or 5,000 miles to our shores to catch fish, do you think they're concerned about conservation? Do you think there's any connection whatever with their government? Do you think the people in their government who administer fisheries have the slightest concern about their practices 3,000 miles away?

Put yourself in a Canadian trawler fishing in the Baltic Sea or the Bay of Biscayne. He's there, and I own the vessel and he's my skipper. This vessel cost me $15 million, and that crew has to earn a living. They're going to catch whatever in hell's name they can catch. They'll high-grade as much as they can possibly get away with in order to maximize the return to that vessel and to the crew. They couldn't give a damn. The evidence is here. We've had Estonian and Russian vessels fishing off our coast and leaving their men stranded in communities, dependent on the Salvation Army to survive. And you think these people are worried about conservation of Canada's resources outside 200 miles?

This summer, Mr. Chairman, two Russian Americans living in New York made a deal with a Hong Kong broker, chartered four Russian vessels to fish redfish, and they landed every second week in Argentia. Argentia was blocked from one end of the year to the other with redfish from 3NO, the same place where Mr. Thibault very wisely announced yesterday that he could not award 3,000 tonnes to Canso--very wisely, because if he had, we would become the laughingstock of the northwest Atlantic.

These four Russian trawlers fished totally uncontrolled, catching redfish this small, brought to Argentia, containerized, put on Maersk vessels into Halifax. And guess where they went? China. They were processed and returned to the western United States for the U.S. market.

And you can go on and on, Mr. Chairman.

Á (1155)

The Chair: I don't want to interrupt you, Mr. Etchegary, but I do want to leave some time for questions. So we will have to take perhaps another five minutes.

Mr. Gus Etchegary: That's fine. I appreciate that. I'm leaving you this, and you can read it.

By the way, I'm saying there's absolutely nothing personal here. I was quite interested, Mr. Chairman, in your remarks yesterday about your frustrations in trying to deal with problems in your province and in other areas and the frustrations you have. Believe me, I've been involved in this for fifty years, and I can assure you that I can appreciate where you're coming from.

I would like to say that I have genuine respect for you people. I really appreciate the opportunity of being here and all the rest of it. But I would like you to convey a message, and I'm saying this in the last paragraph: If the Ottawa mandarins believe that all they have to do is wait us out, let the status quo continue, forcing resettlement of professional fishermen and their families to other parts of Canada, they're dead wrong. It isn't going to happen. Sooner or later, something will be triggered here, and I believe we are about to see it triggered.

Two weeks ago I participated in a CBC forum on this same subject. There were two federal diplomats who were talking about the problem, and they went on to say that we have to be negotiating, we have to continue, and we have to try hard. One of these men I have the greatest respect for. He was an ambassador, as a matter of fact: Len Legault, for Canada--a wonderful man, and I deeply appreciate all the work he's done. But he made a statement that really frightened me, for the simple reason that he said it's time for us to take the bull by the horns and go to Brussels and go to The Hague court to present Canada's case.

What was he presenting? He was going to say they're overfishing, the European Community is overfishing. What the man forgot all about was an article in here, one he was the architect of. It's called the objection procedure. The objection procedure makes the kind of thing these people are doing legitimate. For any overfishing they do above the quotas, all they have to do is invoke the objection procedure, and they can go to The Hague court and say, “What the hell are you talking about, Canada?” Anyway, you have the gist of where I'm coming from with respect to NAFO.

I was a commissioner for 20 years and sat by the side of Dr. Needler, Art May, and some Dutch-Canadian gentlemen, whose name I forget year after year, praying to them in the backrooms. I have gone... Somebody said this morning something about preparing for the NAFO meeting. At one time we would go and sit--this was very early--with the Department of Fisheries officials, including the head of the delegation, who generally was the deputy minister. The briefing notes were presented to the negotiating committee, and we were going to sit and participate in those discussions. Eventually I became a little familiar with the pattern. Behind on the right-hand side was the External Affairs man, and on the other side was the man from International Trade. Every time we got to a tickly subject, one that demanded somewhere along the way that Canada stand up and show a little backbone, one of these gentlemen would stand: Oh, we're going to open an embassy in that country next year; you can't afford to rock the boat--and so on.

Yesterday, by the way, somebody was questioning the trading off of fish. They said, well, you have to be specific; you can't say these things unless you're specific. Well, you don't have enough time here for me to list down for you the things I've become aware of in fifty years.

I'll leave it at that, Mr. Chair. Thank you.

Â (1200)

The Chair: Thank you very much, Mr. Etchegary.

Turning to questions, we have Mr. Lunney.

Mr. James Lunney: Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Thank you, Mr. Etchegary, for a very impassioned.... You obviously have a lot of experience you can bring forth in your presentation. I would like to have known a little more about your involvement for twenty years as a commissioner and your personal experience coming into this. We weren't really introduced to you very well as to your background, other than with respect to the Fisheries Crisis Alliance here. Perhaps just for a minute you could tell us something about your twenty years' experience and explain in what capacity you've been involved in the fishery over all these years.

Mr. Gus Etchegary: Well, I came into the fishery in 1945, long before ACOA, DREE, DRIE, or any of those.

We built plants on the south coast of Newfoundland and had 1,000 people employed in three places. This was in the transition from the saltfish industry, as we knew it, to the new frozen fish industry.

We built a company that was a marvelous company. The head of it was the best and most progressive entrepreneur this province ever produced in the fishing industry. He built an enormous marketing organization in the United States. We sold 6% of our production in the state of Texas in the 1960s and 1970s--the first secondary processing plant in the United States. I was part of that organization. I became president of their company.

I'm going to tell you, in 1971, sir, 25 of us from the east coast, under the name SOFA, made a presentation. I have to mention the name Don Jamieson, who arranged it. But 25 of us went to Ottawa, and using DFO and ICNAF statistics, made a presentation to Jack Davis, Mitchell Sharp, Don Jamieson, and all their staff, including every MP of the Maritimes and their people.

Our presentation was this. In 1971, using charts like this.... Please understand that the catch per unit of effort of a 125-foot trawler had gone down in 1971 from 1965, from 2,000 pounds an hour in 1965 to 800 pounds an hour in 1971. The gillnet, which was catching 50 pounds per 24 hours fishing, had gone down to 60 pounds per 24 hours. This was the guts of our presentation to that group .

Mitchell Sharp, I remember distinctly, came around the table and said, “Now I understand what you people are always shouting about. So please, would you, overnight, make an abbreviated presentation and have it ready for the inner cabinet”, which we did the next morning--Mr. Trudeau and eight of his cabinet. We made this presentation in 1971 and pleaded with them to extend jurisdiction to the continental shelf--not 200 miles: to the continental shelf. Eight years later, they extended to 200 miles.

I could go on and give you intervals along the way where we have made these sorts of presentations time after time. Quite frankly, like most of the people in Newfoundland, we're fed up with it. We have to take a different direction.

Â (1205)

Mr. James Lunney: Thank you.

I appreciate you could probably keep us going for many hours with these stories; it's evident.

I just wanted to pick up on a comment that came earlier that you seemed to take objection to. Mr. Andrews, I believe, made suggestions for an action plan including starting with trying to tune up NAFO in terms of a list of improvements we could put forward: benchmarks for firm timelines, transparent plans in a system, and then a contingency plan for formal notice. If we were to increase observation and supervision--flights over-flying, and so on--and come up with some form of enforcement, you seemed pretty discouraged that there isn't any hope of saving this process. Could you explain why?

Mr. Gus Etchegary: It's gone. We've gone through this, sir. This is a process we've gone through. Some of these people are not necessarily new to these patterns, but they must understand this a process we have gone through over and over and over.

As far as one individual or one organization making representation to the Government of Canada is concerned, or one member or two members going into the House of Commons trying to change the situation we are facing in Newfoundland today, forget it. You're not doing it.

In my view, the only thing that's going to work, sir, is for the government of Newfoundland, the premier of Newfoundland--who I wish was sitting in this room today--to take the initiative and deal with people like you with the assistance and the guidance of the Fisheries Association of Newfoundland and Labrador, the union, the Federation of Municipalities, who, by the way, are the ones that have been really killed here.... There's a load of municipalities around this province that every day are seeing more locks going on, more houses boarded up, and people heading for Ontario to do meat packing or something or other, getting out of this place, going to P.E.I. or to Nova Scotia picking apples or something.

This will not change with the individual effort. Certainly there are some things to be gained for a particular company, or for a particular person, or something like that. But from the point of view of dealing with the problem that we have today on the nose and tail and the Flemish Cap, which by the way is the most prolific fishing area in the world.... And the reason for it is that it is heavily influenced by the Gulf Stream, the fishery nutrients it carries along, which by the way maintains the fishery of Iceland and the fjords of Norway. The only difference is that these two countries have managed their fisheries and we haven't.

You're not going to change it with individual effort or any fancy footwork. It's going to take real leadership, sir, and support, the support of everybody in this room and around this province. It will take everything, the organizations I named, boards of trade, commerce, visiting P.E.I., visiting the west coast, the other fishing provinces on the east coast getting their understanding and support. We have to sell the national public that Newfoundland and Labrador's well-managed fishery will not only contribute to and develop and maintain a quality of life for Newfoundlanders, but contribute to the national economy. And what have we got? We have a welfare state. We have people now hoping and praying that they'll get twenty weeks.

In 1988 we had 6,500 people from Isle aux Morts to Trepassey--6,500. If anybody wants to question that, I'll be delighted to give them the numbers. Sixty-five hundred people employed ashore and afloat 50 weeks a year, 50 weeks a year. No unemployment, no welfare. Now what have you got? Trepassey, just think about it, the most strategic location for a plant in Canada. If you looked at it, I would be able to show you why it is the most strategically located area that we have.

In 1960 Trepassey was an inshore plant, and because of the invasion of 600 vessels and 36,000 men from Europe, which is the number that for 30 years brutalized a resource, Trepassey found itself without its traditional inshore fishery. So we as a company had to do something, either close it down or turn it into a trawler plant. So we hired a financial wizard, developed a business plan, and put seven trawlers into Trepassey. The community was a little community of about 800 or 900 people. It operated for 35 years.

After about eight or nine years of that kind of operation, that community, working 50 weeks a year, ran out of people. As a company, we had to go in and finance 25 houses, and people came from various parts of Newfoundland and left their homes to come to live in Trepassey because it was 50 weeks work. It was not because they wanted welfare or unemployment insurance, but because they wanted to work. And they worked. That community grew. It got a stadium, a wonderful high school. Some of the best young people came out of that high school and went on to universities, got scholarships in sports and academics and went on.

Â (1210)

Mr. Chairman, I'm going to make one more statement.

In 1993, after I had retired, I was asked by a coalition of churches...five heads of churches here in Newfoundland who decided that something had to be done. They were looking at their communities, and their priests, parsons, and ministers, and so on, were in those communities that were dying. So they came together, which is probably unusual, but five denominations came together and asked me to advise them on the fishery.

We did two things. First, with an organization that was rather elaborate, 30 regional captains from northern Labrador to the west and east part of this province came up with 105,000 names of people over 16 years of age, a petition that we presented in the foyer of the Confederation Building with the national press--Global, NTV, CBC, radio, television, newspapers. About 600 people clung around the place...Clyde Wells, Brian Tobin, every MP east of Halifax, and the Prime Minister. He wasn't coming, first of all. He wanted us to go out to Torbay and make the presentation out there on his way home from Europe. We refused to do it, and we found a way--I won't divulge it--to get him to St. John's, and we succeeded.

We presented this petition to him, 105,000 or 106,000 names, to present to Parliament on behalf of the dying communities of Newfoundland. He didn't even present it. It wasn't presented to Parliament.

Â (1215)

The Chair: Thank you, Mr. Etchegary.

Mr. Roy.

[Translation]

Mr. Jean-Yves Roy: I just wanted to thank Mr. Etchegary for his presentation, to tell it that him that it is a cry from the heart which, personally, I understand and that he defends the community he represents very well.

[English]

The Chair: Thank you very much, Mr. Roy.

Mr. Wappel.

Mr. Tom Wappel: Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

Mr. Etchegary, thank you for your presentation. Mr. Hearn apprised us that when we came here we could expect to hear some impassioned remarks, and of course you haven't disappointed.

I have two questions about your presentation, because I know you had to rush through it. You were talking about this CBC public forum two weeks ago. I presume it was public, first of all.

Mr. Gus Etchegary: Yes, it was.

Mr. Tom Wappel: You said there were two federal diplomats there. Who were they?

Mr. Gus Etchegary: Len Legault and Mr. Lapointe.

Mr. Tom Wappel: Are they currently diplomats, or are they retired?

Mr. Gus Etchegary: I don't know what their positions are today, but Mr. Lapointe is a past ambassador. He was very much involved in the deliberations at the last UN conferences in New York, for example. That's the last time I met....

I know them both very well, by the way.

The Chair: I've asked the clerk to get us a transcript of that forum and provide it to the committee.

Mr. Tom Wappel: Good, because I want to be clear as to exactly what they said. It doesn't help Canada if publicly our diplomats are saying we haven't a ghost of a chance of negotiating a position.

The other thing I want to ask you is your opinion here, on page 2--and we've heard from other people about this issue--that ministers and senior bureaucrats of DFAIT, the Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade, are somehow muzzling DFO officials from pushing a Canadian perspective. Do you have any evidence of that, or is that just your feeling?

Â (1220)

Mr. Gus Etchegary: There's only so far you can go in saying things, but the fact of the matter is that from my first day as a commissioner in NAFO, these people were forever present in the room on fisheries negotiations. These were international, admittedly, but nevertheless, they were there. All during those preparations for negotiations, their intrusion....

I said one thing, for example. I don't want to name the state, but there was one particular case where there was a terrible infraction outside the 200 miles. The external affairs representative said, “Boys, you're going to have to go awful easy on that one. We're opening an embassy there next year.” It's that sort of thing.

As far as international trade is concerned—

Mr. Tom Wappel: Excuse me, sir, but that's presumably an opinion of the DFAIT person. He's not the head of delegation.

Mr. Gus Etchegary: No.

Mr. Tom Wappel: Are you saying the head of delegation was taking direction from DFAIT?

Mr. Gus Etchegary: I don't know whether he was or not.

Mr. Tom Wappel: You were there, right? What was your impression?

Mr. Gus Etchegary: I was there, but I can tell you that from my point of view, the position I would like to see Canada take on that particular issue was not followed. I don't know whether that answers you or not. I have never, in all the years I was there in that position, felt that the issues we had in front of us.... I mean, every single thing Canada touched after we entered Confederation has gone to hell in a hand barrel. Look at every single species. These are not my numbers, these are DFO. That's DFO. I'm telling you, sir, that's only part of the story.

I have very strong feelings about the way DFO works. Once upon a time we had a fisheries research board, which was a buffer. If I were the Minister for Fisheries for Canada, I would have welcomed it. You have to face it: under the Coastal Fisheries Protection Act, the Minister of Fisheries for Canada has dictatorial powers. Any time he wishes to move, who is to say, who is to confront? Bureaucrats are there, some of them for many years, and I suppose they're helpful. Some of them I think are there far too long and have developed positions on certain matters that I think would be refreshing to see changed. I don't mind saying that. I feel strongly about it, to be perfectly honest with you. I see too many things, too many things. I hate to do this, but I have to get the point home to you.

I and other members of our group make it a point to be current on fisheries matters. We have contacts in various places. We still have contacts in Europe and certainly lots of contacts in the local and domestic fisheries. In addition to that, we have had lunch with the minister and the deputies and the scientists and so on to be current so that we're not stupid when we make some kind of remark. Believe me, anything I'm saying here is on the basis of fact. This one incident will give you an idea of how that department works and the political expediency that is rampant.

Three or four months ago, it came to our attention that an extremely important research survey, which had gone on for close to thirty years as sort of a time series thing and which demanded that it be continued on an annual basis in order to maintain the continuity of information on the state of stocks.... Understand?

It came to our attention that because of some problems with some vessels in the fleet, they couldn't go. We began to make some inquiries, and we found out that yes, one of the vessels was broken down but it was repairable. I won't go into that coast guard thing, but we found out those vessels were not available. With a little work and by getting the parts that were needed, maybe they could do it, but anyway the final word was “Sorry, the work is going to be cancelled”.

I can tell you that there were a lot of people upset. Somebody had the temerity to pick up the telephone, call a certain individual, and tell him--didn't ask him--pick up your telephone, call Mr. Dhaliwal, and tell him that if this survey is not put back in place, it will become an open-line issue from Victoria to St. John's. And when you're finished with that, pick up the telephone again, call Mr. Tobin, and tell him the same thing. And by the way, we want an answer within 48 hours.

Now, I take no pride whatsoever in saying to you that the survey was restored. That's an example of the ad hockery, the political involvement, the lack of management, and the lack of leadership that have gotten the Newfoundland fishing industry where it is.

I remind you that when you look at that middle chart, the one that goes from 1875 up to 1992, up until that spike you see at the end the blue is the Newfoundland catch--not Canadian--which by the way went into saltfish, which was the pride of this province for centuries. The top green is of course the Spanish, French, and Portuguese fisheries. It goes back to that date in 1875 we have a record of.

Â (1225)

The Chair: I'm going to have to move on.

Mr. Stoffer.

Mr. Peter Stoffer: Mr. Chairman, thank you.

Gus, thank you very much for your presentation.

Sir, you said that two members of the cabinet, two ministers, were aware of the situation in September 2000. Who were they?

Mr. Gus Etchegary: I'd rather not say, but they were two cabinet members.

Mr. Peter Stoffer: It would sure be nice to know who they were.

You also say in your report, sir, “NAFO, complete with its objection procedure”. Who negotiated the objection procedure when NAFO started?

Mr. Gus Etchegary: Well, it had been in ICNAF as well. Having lived through this objection procedure, I can tell you that when the time came for extension of jurisdiction to 200 miles, I was a commissioner on this side and a fellow named Kjell Hendriksen--you may or may not know the man--was the other commissioner. We saw a great opportunity to have this thing removed, this objection procedure, which by the way is the essence of the weakness of NAFO. NAFO is a useless organization because of the objection procedure. We saw that, and we knew it, because we were living with it.

We went to the government and said now is our opportunity. Now, why was it an opportunity? I'll tell you. It was 1978. Extension of jurisdiction was taking place, so the Spanish, the Portuguese, the Germans, and the whole bloody bunch of them were on their knees saying to Canada, “This is a tremendous withdrawal you're asking us to take; my goodness, our nations have depended on this resource”, etc. They were on their knees looking for 2,000, 3,000, or 4,000 tonnes.

By the way, the peak of the Spanish fishery was in 1972, when they took 358,000 tonnes. So here they are now looking for 3,000 tonnes on their knees, and we, myself and my other commissioner, saw the opportunity of getting rid of this bloody thing. So we said to the commissioner, “Please, go to the powers that be and let's really get rid of this objection procedure.” Well, needless to say, it wasn't done; they paid no attention to us.

Â (1230)

Mr. Peter Stoffer: Okay. I know I'm going to be cut off pretty soon.

You also said in your report that for diplomatic reasons, ministers and senior bureaucrats just don't want DFO to confront foreign fishing. As you know, the constitutional obligation of DFO is the protection of fish and fish habitat. I've said in this committee, and I've been corrected many times, because I'm technically not allowed to say it.... I've suspected for many years, even though I don't live in Newfoundland and Labrador, that when Canada joined Newfoundland and Labrador in Confederation there was a tradeoff for fish stocks for other economies in the rest of Canada.You said you could be here all day giving examples. Can you just give one example of what you suspect was traded off?

Mr. Gus Etchegary: How about a Hyundai plant in Quebec in exchange for Canadian support for Korea? How about it? How about landing rights in Madrid or Lisbon for Canadian Pacific of that day, or removal of U.K. tariff on halibut from Canada in exchange for a larger quota in northern cod?

Mr. Peter Stoffer: Thank you.

The Chair: Mr. Hearn, last questioner.

Mr. Loyola Hearn: Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

I think I'll just make a couple of brief comments, because really, what do you ask at this stage?

I fairly seldom get upset, but a couple of nights ago at a meeting with the Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade when they told us nothing could be done, I lost it. I lost it because I was thinking of Trepassey. You mentioned Trepassey. I was teaching there in 1977. I went into politics in 1982 with Bill Matthews. I saw a town where everybody worked. During the summer all the kids worked. You had people brought in from all over the province to work in a place that provided 52 weeks of work every year. They got their new school and library, new gym, seniors complex, fire hall, and roads done. And now they can't maintain what they got, simply because of the fishery.

The other comment I'd like to make, Mr. Chairman, is not really a comment; it's a thank you to Mr. Etchegary. When he was trying to get his translation machine working he said “I wish my wife was here”. Well, I'm not sure whether to give him the credit or to give his wife the credit for the reason we're here, because it was a great feed of fish that his wife cooked up one day that brought a bunch of us together, where Mr. Etchegary and Mr. Andrews and some others clearly demonstrated the concern about this very issue and the reason why in September I brought it to the committee. I'm sure that when I talked about the nose and the tail in September that an awful lot of people here didn't have a clue what I was talking about, but they certainly know now.

I think it's fair to say, Mr. Etchegary, you're the reason we're here. We will look after the federal end. Maybe you want to comment on this. The key is now to focus Newfoundland's attention to it collectively. We have the people here in the hall, and some I'm sure are ready and willing to carry the ball, but there has to be a central focus. I certainly think you have support around this table and we can build on that more. So maybe take your direction on that.

Mr. Gus Etchegary: Very good.

If I may, to come back to that CBC forum, that is available. If you have any difficulty with it, there are people in the CBC who will certainly supply you. I honestly believe you should hear the voice of those diplomats telling us to behave ourselves.

The Chair: Thank you, Mr. Hearn and Mr. Etchegary. As I said earlier, we will get a transcript of that CBC forum.

Just as a last comment, you heard me say this morning that there are a lot of similarities between this issue and other issues across the country. We've talked about softwood lumber, we've talked about potatoes, we've talked about wheat. About as many people said yesterday that Canada is seen as a pussycat around the world when it comes to standing its ground on a trade issue, or issues such as this that are jurisdictional and management issues.

That being said, we've asked for a number of things from witnesses this morning, and I think Loyola said it's important that Newfoundland and Labrador really push the issue as well. I just want to emphasize that we can make a report--and you know sometimes what happens to reports. Now, I will say in the last two and a half to three years, we've been quite successful in getting our recommendations accepted as a committee. Maybe 80% of them have been accepted, which is reasonably good. We work together well as a committee.

But I will say this, and say it directly. Nothing will really happen on this big an issue unless there's a major strategy built on how you get to the Prime Minister's Office, how you get to the G-8, the G-20, the first ministers meetings, etc. We will do our bit. But I would suggest to everyone in the room, and contacts that we all have elsewhere, that it's going to require a concerted strategy to move the issue forward in a comprehensive way. I think you probably understand that better than most, given your experience.

So with that, we thank you very much again for your forceful presentations.

Committee members, we have a choice, and I'll ask for your direction on this. We can have a working lunch, go and get our sandwiches and bring them in here. I'd suggest what we do is take 15 minutes to gather up some sandwiches, bring them in here, and we'll start with John Efford. We have three witnesses who are not on our original list.

John Efford, I saw you a minute ago. We'll start with you in 15 minutes.

People, pick up your sandwiches and coffee, and we'll meet here and continue.

Â (1232)

· (1304)

· (1305)

The Chair: Can we come to order, people.

We have before us John Efford, former Minister of Fisheries in Newfoundland and now nominated candidate in Brian Tobin's old riding.

And you're the owner of Pinhorn Consulting, I see in the paper here. Right?

Mr. John Efford (Owner, Efford Pinhorn Consulting): Right.

The Chair: The floor is yours.

· (1310)

Mr. John Efford: Thank you, Mr. Chair.

I too will welcome you and your committee members to the beautiful province of Newfoundland and Labrador. The hospitality of the people and the pristine environment speaks well for Newfoundland and Labrador, but the lack of resources in our oceans gives us a great negative climate that we only wish there was some resolution to in the near future.

I'm going to begin my remarks speaking on behalf of the citizens of Newfoundland and Labrador, and I'll begin with explaining why, when you looked around the room yesterday and today, you saw the lack of participants, the lack of people coming in to view or to listen to what's going on. There are two reasons for that. One, the lesser reason, is the fact that there wasn't a lot of publicity. I'm not being critical when I say that, but that's the lesser reason. The larger reason is how often can people be kicked? How often can people be beaten and how often can they take such losses and still maintain motivation? We sometimes use the words “complacency” or “passiveness”, but the words we should use are that people just don't see any hope any more.

If you looked at the province ten years ago, prior to the moratorium, and you looked at the people living in the communities, as many presenters have said before me, they were mostly working 50 weeks of the year. Even in the seasonal plants, the inshore plants, there was sustainable work for people. Communities were very vibrant. People had a reason to be enthusiastic. People had a reason to be motivated, and people had a reason to be active in their communities.

If you go around the communities of Newfoundland and Labrador today, except for the ones depending on the crab fishery, you'll see, as has been explained already, houses boarded up. In many cases, you could happen into a community any day of the week and see trucks loading up furniture and moving on. You see the emotion in the seniors, the parents of the people who are moving on, having to watch their sons and daughters and grandchildren move out of the community, move out of the province to find employment.

That is the description I wanted to bring to you for you to understand the frustration that people have. When I left here yesterday, I went to a meeting in my own community made up of a group of fishermen who were doing some recreational work in the community and I said to them, “Why aren't you into the hearings on the overfishing on the Grand Banks?” One young fisherman quickly spoke up: “What's the point? Nobody's going to listen. They pay lip service. Lip service has been paid for the last 10, 15 years. Since the moratorium we've participated, we've followed the rules.” This is their message. They've followed the rules of conservation in every manner whatsoever, from dockside monitoring to proper-sized mesh on the crab pots, going without the ability to go out and catch cod, catch herring, catch capelin or mackerel, because of the low stocks. They've cooperated and they've participated in every way possible.

When they look at the foreign fleets outside the 200-mile limit in their boats.... And one fisherman described to me an incident last year inside the 200-mile limit. The name of the boat is the Carl Venture, from Port de Grave, and the skipper's name is Carl Petten. He was coming in in the fog from his shrimp fishery just inside the 200-mile limit. He saw the ocean in front of him white--everything looked like a blanket of white. He couldn't figure out what it was. In the fog things are distorted, so he slowed down. He slowed down his boat and he looked over. It was codfish. He passed a foreign fishing trawler inside the 200-mile limit. That was witnessed by a fisherman last year on the Grand Banks. That was reported by me to DFO. From that day to this, I have not heard a word back.

So you can understand why they are not here and why they will not come. They have given up, I guess the word is, out of total frustration, because the management of the fisheries has been dismal.

I want to go back to 1992. Let's not blame it on any individual group in particular. I've said this in many speeches I've given across Newfoundland and Labrador and across Canada: we all participated--foreigners, Canadians, Newfoundlanders, fishermen or not fishermen. People out there overfished and broke the conservation laws. They are guilty, but those of us who sat idly by and allowed it to happen must share and take the responsibility as well as the ones who participated. That is where we begin.

But then we all accepted that responsibility in 1992. The Newfoundland fishing industry said in 1992 that we are not going to create this mistake ever again, that we will do whatever is necessary to provide a long-term fishing plan for ourselves, for our communities, for our province.

The only thing now left to earn a living from is the crab fishery--the shellfish industry, mainly crab. Think about what I just said. The only species left to earn a living from is the crab. God forbid that the crab stock fails. I'm not going to be negative when I say this, and it's by no means wishful thinking. As sure as it crawls on the bottom of the ocean, just through nature's own cyclical manner, it will fail at some point in time.

In the early eighties, when there were only 50 boats fishing crab in Newfoundland and Labrador, they used to go out with all the pots. There was no limit on the pots they could use, and they'd fish all week for 10,000 pounds. Today, there's 3,517 boats fishing for crab--3,5l7. They're fishing wisely; they're on IQs; they're using the proper-sized mesh. But we have no control over what nature and the markets will do. When the Alaskan crab returns and they put another 250 million crab into the market, the bigger the supply, the lower the price. That's going to happen.

So we're not managing our fishery. There I've got to take the position. In 1992 when that great tragedy hit our shores and impacted on approximately 70,000 Newfoundlanders and Labradorians, you would have thought DFO, in its wisdom, would have sat down immediately and worked with people and put a group together to develop an appropriate management plan for the fishery of the future. That should have been done, and I have said that a thousand times in the past.

When I was minister--and before I was Minister of Fisheries, in other portfolios I held--every time I went to Ottawa or every time I spoke to someone, I asked that question. To this day there's no appropriate plan in place to manage the fishery of the future inside the 200-mile limit or outside. We are reactionary on every issue, never with a vision of where we should go in the future, never proactive.

So since 1992, with the collapse of the groundfish industry in Newfoundland and Labrador and I would say probably the largest cod stocks, unequalled anywhere else in the world, and today, as one presenter said this morning, it's almost to the point of extinction, and still there is no defined plan. There's your challenge. It's not whether in 2002 we should, all of us collectively, deal with the overfishing on the Grand Banks of Newfoundland, decide whether NAFO is right or not--and I'll speak on that in a few minutes--extend the jurisdiction, or take custodial management of the continental shelf. That is a problem.

Your biggest problem--our biggest problem--to deal with is changing the attitude of DFO, of the central government of this country, which I assume will be a problem. That is your biggest challenge.

You talk to people in Ottawa. Decisions are made 2,000 miles away by a lot of people who have absolutely no understanding of the fishery in Newfoundland and Labrador, who have probably never seen the Atlantic Ocean in many cases. But then the leadership is not there, because if the leadership was there, and the understanding of those people who understand the fishery, there would have been some planning put in place in 1992 to look at the long term, to learn from the past, to learn from the mistakes we have made in our past.

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To control the fishing outside the 200-mile limit, to control and manage the fishing inside the 200-mile limit, has to begin with leadership. I can point and I can say the reasons why it's not being done, but I can also say that I fear it's not going to be done. I don't think Canada, the people outside of Newfoundland and Labrador--I'm talking about the majority; I'm not singling out any one group--see the importance of the fishery to this province, as they see that of the auto industry to Ontario, or of the farming industry to western Canada, or the softwood lumber issue. They do not see it. You don't hear the same clips being carried on the news media about the ministers and the Prime Minister and everybody getting involved. For some reason, we haven't been able to communicate to the rest of Canada the importance of the fishery to the very existence of the people, not only in our rural communities but in our urban centres.

When I heard last week about the devastation they're going to experience in Canso, it immediately came to my mind that dozens and dozens of communities in Newfoundland and Labrador haven't enjoyed one day of employment for its people since 1992. The mayor of Burgeo did a very good job yesterday and explained the position of his community. Some people who were not planning right but who are responsible for managing our fisheries should take a visit to a Burgeo, to a Trepassey, or to a Twillingate, or many other parts of this province, and see the devastation people are going through.

You ask yourself the question: if the people are going through this devastation, why aren't they more vocal? Why isn't there more of a militancy within the people? Well, I've already explained that, but I want to quickly get into what happened here today and yesterday. We are our own worst enemy.

I sat down yesterday and listened to most of the presenters, and again this morning. I saw many different views. Many presenters didn't come out with a clear position. I'm thinking about the chairman and you committee members. How are you going to draw a recommendation out of all the presenters you've heard in the past couple of days and the rest of today?

Where we failed again is we are not organized. Gus Etchegary touched on it; something has to trigger us. We are not organized. We should have had a pre-meeting among ourselves here in Newfoundland somewhere. It should have been led by the Minister of Fisheries and/or the unions and/or all of us. We should have had a meeting and we should have discussed a position that we, collectively, should take on the overfishing on the Grand Banks of Newfoundland. It should have been clear and precise from every single presenter who's going to get that message through to Ottawa.

I remember what David Anderson said to me one time on the sealing issue, and I'm going to get to that in a minute. I've spoken in every single province in Canada. I've gotten pats on the back sometimes so I've had to rub my shoulder, with people saying, “John, you're doing a great job in your speeches”. I'm not interested in doing a great job; I'm interested in getting information out.

David Anderson, when he was Minister of Fisheries, said, “John, you're the only one in Newfoundland who cares, and we have too much pressure from the IFAW, so why should we do anything?” You see, we're not speaking with one voice. We are individually getting our own points of view across, sometimes selfishly--and there's nothing wrong with being selfish if you're in individual businesses--but, collectively, if we do not unite with one strong voice here in this province, this problem is not going to be solved.

Someone said close the ports. Great idea. Nothing wrong with it. But would that be an excuse for the Canadian government not to do anything else? We'll see how that works for a year or two years. Let me say to you, we don't have a year; we don't have two years. We don't have any time left. This issue has reached such a crisis situation.

Barring the crab fishery, I'm going to tell you, there's going to be some tragedy in this province; 1992 will be like a Sunday school picnic. I am quite serious when I say that. If you look at the debt load carried by the industry today and the debt load carried by the individual fishermen because they've had to get newer boats to go further at sea to catch the crab, and at tremendous expense--1992.

· (1320)

I don't think there will be another TAGS program. I really don't think that will ever happen again. Then Newfoundland and Labrador will exist no longer with that type of a situation. What plan do we have in place to prevent that from happening? Except for fishing the crab, with conservation measures as we are doing, we cannot control nature. So we don't have a plan to diversify our fishery.

Keep in mind that we probably had the largest cod stock, unequalled anywhere in the world. I've been through these types of presentations many times before. I went to Ottawa on the seal fishery. I took an all-party committee. Imagine John Efford taking an all-party committee, one of the most partisan people who ever walked in a pair of shoes. But I did, for the sake of Newfoundland and Labrador.

We all went to Ottawa. Mr. Easter, you were there. We presented on a tragedy that's about to take place in Newfoundland: the extinction of our fish stocks--not just our cod stocks. We talked about an overpopulated seal herd. This morning the numbers were given that the foreigners overfish approximately 100,000 tonnes of fish on the Grand Banks. That's peanuts. It's peanuts to what's happening inside the 200-mile limit. Science itself has shown very clearly that one seal consumes one tonne of fish a year. That's not my exaggeration, that's not my political rhetoric; that's factual. They said last year the population of harp seals is somewhere between 5.2 million and 6 million. They said last year when they'd done the count there were one million harp pups born last year. There are one million hooded seals and there are three-quarters of a million grey seals off Nova Scotia.

Gentlemen, they all eat fish. Science says one tonne of fish per seal. We have somewhere between 5.2 million and 6 million, so let's say there are 5 million. We have a million hood, that's 6 million. We have three-quarters of a million grey, that's 6.75 million. That's 6.75 million tonnes of commercial fish is eaten every single year. And there's not one thing done about it.

The managers of our fish stocks are excluding the interests of a species or some species of fish that matter not only to Newfoundlanders and Labradorians, but matter to the world food chain. It's a renewable resource that we're allowing to be completely wiped out.

The best thing that we've all done in the last decade is pay lip service. So I ask you the question, are we paying lip service again? Are we paying lip service to what's taking place outside on the Grand Banks?

You asked the question, Peter, about the observers. One observer per boat. Can't find the records, but must sleep at least 16 hours out of 24. Who knows? Probably when he's awake, as someone said, he's participating in the fishery. That's like putting the fox guarding the hen house, isn't it? Are we really getting anything out of that?

You see, again, we're paying lip service. The Estai was lip service. As far as I understand, we paid most of the expenses after we proved that they were catching these small fish.

Meshes were shown around the table this morning about the size of fishnet that was used back then. I'm telling you, they're being used again. I can tell you they're being used again. Don't think that those people out there are fishing and not fishing those small fish. I've been told that it's happening. They're not fishing for concerns of what they can do to conserve fish for the long term. They have one objective in mind: the bottom line.

When the fish ends on the Grand Banks of Newfoundland, they'll go somewhere else, the Spanish and Portuguese. We're talking this morning about 100,000 pounds of groundfish. We're not talking about the 50,000 tonnes of shrimp that they catch out there. You see? So it's an ongoing madness, I would call it, an ongoing madness with any deterioration.

Can Canada do it? Yes. Does Canada have the will to do it? No. They had the will to arrest two seniors, two years ago down off Musgrave Harbour, down in Bonavista Bay, Notre Dame Bay, because they went out and caught ten fish for their winter. They went outside the time zone, the time slotted to catch. One was 75 and one was 77. They went to court and they paid an $800 fine. That's the enforcement that we have here.

· (1325)

The Chair: John....

Mr. John Efford: My boat was boarded last year when I had one fish aboard my boat. I was in the legal time, by the way. So I'm saying, if you want me to conclude....

The Chair: Yes, we're going to need a little time for questions.

Mr. John Efford: I'm saying very clearly that you can put all the facts and figures on that you like. You can put an economic value on the amount of cod that's taken and the groundfish that's outside the 200-mile limit, and you can document what's inside the 200-mile limit and look at the seals. Now, I've proven beyond a shadow of a doubt that the will is not there for Canada to take the necessary action for the best interests of the fishing industry, which includes the best interests of the Newfoundland and Labradorians.

I believe strongly that it's because of trade relations. I believe very strongly that it's because of what the loss may be to other provinces and on other products in this country. I don't think that we in Newfoundland and Labrador have clearly communicated to the decision makers how important the fishing industry is, not only to our province but to the world food chain. We've faltered in our description of what has happened in Newfoundland over the last number of years, we're faltering today as seen very clearly in this room, and until we take the right action in this province, I don't think there are going to be any changes taking place in Ottawa.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

· (1330)

The Chair: Thank you very much, Mr. Efford.

We'll start with Andy Burton.

Mr. Andy Burton: Thank you, Mr. Chairman, and thank you for your presentation, Mr. Efford.

I certainly agree with a lot of the things you've said. One of the things that's really critical is speaking with one voice. That's one of the problems the softwood lumber industry has run into across Canada, not speaking totally together. As you know, united we stand and divided we fall, so I think that's really important.

As to your issue on the seals, I really agree with you. I've been saying it for many years. We have a similar problem on the west coast. The seals are creating a huge problem with the wild stocks, and they have to be dealt with.

You made a point about fishery decisions being made in an ivory tower somewhere many thousands of miles from the fish. We have exactly the same concerns on the west coast. I've heard it I don't know how many times. I have to say a large number of issues that come into my riding office, which is on the west coast, are fishery, DFO-related issues. These are certainly problems that are common to both coasts.

My question is this. You mentioned that if you had the opportunity, you'd have a management group put together with a view to looking at diversifying and at what should really be done with the fishery on the east coast. What would you envision as the makeup of that group?

Mr. John Efford: The minister in Ottawa would have to look at Atlantic Canada, not just Newfoundland and Labrador. You would have to put together a task force made up of a combination of people in the fishing industry, other industry, and science plus laymen too: people who are not going to be selfish over one particular issue and who will look at an appropriate management plan for rebuilding stocks. Look at the negatives: the foreign overfishing, the seal population, and the gear type. This should have been done back in 1992.

We were still using gill nets. I know a fisherman here in Newfoundland and Labrador who last year put out 150 turbot nets and never went back to haul them in for two weeks. For two weeks they fished, and not only did they kill the turbot, which rotted in the nets, they also killed thousands of pounds of crab.

So there's not an appropriate management plan put in place for the fishery for the long term. You need to involve people in the fishing industry because all too often we exclude fishermen, people who participate in it every day. It has to be a rounded-out group of people from all parts of the industry and from outside.

Mr. Andy Burton: If we were to take this as a recommendation to the minister, is this the approach you would recommend personally?

Mr. John Efford: Most definitely. If I had been minister, it would have been done in 1992.

Mr. Andy Burton: Thank you.

I think Mr. Lunney has a quick question.

The Chair: Mr. Lunney, you may have one quick question.

Mr. James Lunney: You touched on something we probably haven't heard enough about. We've done a lot with the foreign fleets and so on but not with the seals. We did hear someone mention earlier that the price of seal is up--for pelts, I guess--and that's probably a good thing. But what can be done? You've been involved in this, I understand. Do you have any kind of notion of what can be done to help move this agenda forward for a more realistic management plan?

Mr. John Efford: The markets in the short term will never be able to sustain the numbers of seals we need to take out of the population right now. We have neglectfully mismanaged that seal population because of the major imbalance: such a low fish stock and such a major population of seals. There are many things we can do whether we think we're going to sell the pelts in the world or not.

In the case of Australia, they had the same problem with the kangaroos. They worried about the animal rights organizations. Two years ago they brought in an annual cull. They sell the skins to the tanneries in Italy and those places to make leather. What they do with the meat, I don't know. At some point in time, we can manufacture that product here in Newfoundland.

Let's think about the 33,000 children who die of starvation every single day in the world. We have a community like Burgeo, with not one job. We could put in a seal plant and manufacture that seal meat into a dried protein powder form, which has already been researched and done. As we buy Canadian wheat and as we buy other Canadian food product and send it over to third world countries, that could be done by the Government of Canada. It could create hundreds of jobs and save people's lives, instead of wasting a major product.

What's going to happen in the very near future when the food chain runs out for the seals? The population's going to be so large, nature's going to kill them all. What a waste. We'll destroy the present industry that we have and we'll destroy what industries we could have here in Newfoundland and Labrador today.

So if there is a will--and this is the point I make to the chairman--the will has to be there to do it. There are ways, but the will is not there.

· (1335)

The Chair: I believe the sustainable seal herd is two million.

Mr. John Efford: Two million to 2.5 million.

The Chair: Now we've got over six million, so we've got four million too many.

Monsieur Roy.

[Translation]

Mr. Jean-Yves Roy: Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Mr. Efford, I thank you for your presentation. You spoke to us mostly about the lack of understanding by the rest of Canada of the situation in Newfoundland and anything having to do with the fisheries. But yesterday, there were two stakeholders who came to see us who mentioned a possibility for finally resolving this lack of understanding, that is, the shared management of the fisheries between Fisheries and Oceans and the Government of Newfoundland.

Is this a proposal that would be agreeable to you? Would you accept this kind of proposal? Would you want the management of fisheries to be shared between the federal government and the government of Newfoundland?

[English]

Mr. John Efford: Well, certainly we'd like to see more shared responsibility of the fishery here in Newfoundland and Labrador. I've advocated that for many years. But we can back up from that a bit and go to the regional offices of DFO itself.

I believe very strongly that the regional office of the director general here in Newfoundland and Labrador should have a greater say and a greater decision-making power over fisheries here in Newfoundland, in New Brunswick, in Nova Scotia. They cannot even make a decision here in Newfoundland and Labrador about a simple thing like a food fishery--it has to go to Ottawa. So more decision-making power done out in the regions, and certainly shared management with the province--not in science, not in enforcement management; we don't have the resources to do it. But in a lot of decisions that are made the province should play a role. Certainly the jurisdictions of DFO should have a greater management say in this province.

The Chair: Go ahead.

[Translation]

Mr. Jean-Yves Roy: Pardon me, but I don't think I heard you correctly. Did you say that, apart from the research, the science, you would want the management of the fisheries, the management of the resource, to be shared? DId you say you would exclude research?

[English]

Mr. John Efford: I'm saying that the Government of Newfoundland and Labrador does not have the financial ability to participate in the enforcement and the management. And I'm glad you raised that, because it brings another point to mind.

We're asking Canada, now, to extend jurisdiction--and I'll read a paragraph of where they can do it in a few minutes--outside the 200-mile limit and take over the enforcement and the science outside the 200-mile limit. And they're not allowing nearly enough resources inside for science. We can't get real good science enforcement resources within DFO inside the 200-mile limit. And there is where I say the will and the attitude of the importance of the fishery to Newfoundland and Labrador has to change within Ottawa. We need more science inside. We need more enforcement surveillance inside and outside the 200-mile limit. We're not even doing that at home, and we're asking them now to do it abroad.

Mr. Jean-Yves Roy: Merci.

The Chair: Mr. Matthews.

Mr. John Efford: First of all, allow me to go inside first, then I'll address the outside.

We immediately should have a reduction, a cull, of the seal population. Otherwise, what you do outside the 200 miles, it doesn't matter. The seals are now, by the way, out on the nose and tail of the Grand Banks. So that's a major problem.

We should extend jurisdiction of the nose and tail of the Grand Banks. I said that when John Crosbie was Minister of Fisheries for Canada, and he told me that I was a fool--those are the words he used--and that I didn't know what I was talking about.

But let me read you something from the press, from the Geotimes of December 2001, entitled “New U.S. support for the Law of the Sea”. And this is extending to the nose and tail of the Grand Banks. The paragraph, regarding the limits of the continental shelf, reads:

As of now, no country has submitted its limits for review. But, international and State Department officials confirm that Russia intends to do so before the end of the year for its continental shelf in the Arctic. Under the laws of the Convention, every coastal country has exclusive economic rights out to 200 nautical miles, even if their continental shelf does not extend that far. However, countries are not limited to that zone if their continental shelves extend beyond 200 nautical miles. And the Convention does not require a formal claim. If a country defines its limits based on the Convention's recommendations, then those limits are considered final and binding. Should the commission recommend that Russia go ahead and follow the limits it submits, and Russia does, then no country can argue where those limits fall.

You see? The problem is with ourselves now. When I was Minister of Social Services, I remember one day I had a meeting with the top executives of the department. It was a very controversial piece of legislation I was about to bring in, and they gave me every reason in the world not to do it. I tapped on the desk and said, “I don't want to hear any more of that; I want to hear the reasons why we should do it.” And that's what is not happening today. We're finding all the reasons why it shouldn't be done and the will is not there to find a reasonable way to do it.

I mean, that is part of the world's food chain. It's an environmental tragedy that's happening out there, and except for a situation like this, nobody's talking about it.

I can tell you, NAFO is not working, and NAFO will not work. You can wait your three years, but just imagine asking a rapist to stop raping, trying to make a deal with him. You deal with criminals in the manner in which they should be dealt with: “Stop it”.

· (1340)

The Chair: Mr. Stoffer.

Mr. Peter Stoffer: Thank you, Mr. Efford.

Let me put you in an extremely hypothetical situation. There's a byelection in Trinity--Bonavista, and you're running in it. You win, you go to Ottawa, and you meet the Prime Minister. What do you tell him?

Mr. John Efford: Oh....

Some hon. members: Oh, oh!

Mr. John Efford: Seriously, how long a meeting can I have with him?

Mr. Peter Stoffer: I have four minutes and you can have them all.

Mr. John Efford: Seriously.

Somebody asked me awhile ago why I'm running in the federal election. I'm retired, drawing a little pension, and I've started up a consulting firm that's doing very well, I might say. But I sat back and said, “If I'm not going to participate in trying to improve on all of the things I've talked about over the years, then I'm just as bad as the next person who's laid-back.” And I don't want to be laid-back.

I hope I get the chance to go to Ottawa. I hope I get the chance to sit in the Atlantic caucus, sit in the caucus of the Liberal Party, and I hope I get the chance to talk to the Prime Minister and for him to listen to me on everything I've said over the last ten years, bar nothing.

Mr. Peter Stoffer: Okay.

Sir, on the seals, as you know, when you came to Ottawa and gave your presentation, we met with your delegation in one of the hotels there. You had mentioned the words “seal cull”. I hope, for the sake of Newfoundland and Labrador and all of Canada--and I'm going to give you the chance to clarify here--you don't mean to take two million to three million seals and just shoot them, or kill them, and let them rot on the bottom of the ocean. As you said to me then, and I'd like you to clarify it again, what Canada should be doing....

By the way, we did, I thought, a very good report on seals after your presentation. Wayne was there, and others were there as well. I thought it was a very good report on the seals. It was ignored, of course, by the government.

Our recommendation was that the government should set up a marketing strategy to offset and try to convince other nations that seal products, seal meat and pelts, are very good products that could be utilized in a very effective manner.

I'd just like to give you a chance to clarify that.

Mr. John Efford We don't mind culling people. We don't mind the millions of tonnes of fish being eaten every year. In the case of large fish, only the stomach is eaten, and then they rot on the bottom of the ocean. That's okay, but don't cull a seal. I agree, Canada doesn't have the political appetite to make that happen.

By the way, we're the only country in the world with a seal population where there is not an annual cull to keep the population under control. Even the United States, on the Pribilof Islands off Alaska, has an annual seal cull. Do you know what they do with them? They put them in the dump and bury them with a tractor. But nobody knows about that, no animal rights organizations.

We don't have to do that. We have millions of starving people in the world. Seal meat has the highest protein value of any meat in the world and less fat, 4% fat. We can utilize that product, create jobs here in Newfoundland and Labrador, and the Canadian government could send all over the world, in food aid, the seal meat we can't sell. By the way, the Chinese people are starting to open up their markets to seal products. I mean, 1.4 billion people? It's time to get serious. It's time to do something right.

· (1345)

The Chair: Thank you, Mr. Efford.

Mr. Hearn.

Mr. Loyola Hearn: Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman.

When I listened to the first half of John's speech, I took a note for a question. I wrote down the word “seals”, because I didn't think he was going to talk about them, but I should have known something different. I am surprised and disappointed, though, that he didn't talk about seal oil capsules, which apparently, as people tell you--

Mr. John Efford: The chairman wouldn't allow me the time.

The Chair: Are you saying you can't teach an old dog new tricks?

Mr. Loyola Hearn: Probably.

He's dead on. We have a world where we have a lot of people starving. The seal pelt creates the best and strongest leather you will ever see. It is extremely decorative stuff, if you want to be fancy. Flippers are a delicacy. You can market all of the product, including the oil for capsules.

With a little bit of the R and D funding that's thrown around everywhere, we could have a whole new industry here in Newfoundland and solve two problems at one time. It would be a chance for our fish stocks to grow and our seal population to provide a lot of jobs.

The other issue, however, and we've gone into that--you might want to mention seal oil capsules as well, John--is gillnets. You referred to them, and it's been raised by a number of people. A lot of our people may not be aware of what we're talking about when we mention gillnets and the effect of the monofilament nets. Perhaps you could just fill us in on that.

The Chair: I don't want to interrupt you two, but we are here to look at Canada's exclusive economic zone on the nose and tail of the Grand Banks and Flemish Cap. We have to get to that issue.

Mr. Loyola Hearn: It fits right in.

Mr. John Efford: I was happy I didn't get on yesterday, because I understood that was the only issue. I understood that today the agenda mentions extension of the jurisdiction and other fishing issues.

Mr. Bill Matthews: The culling of seals.

Mr. John Efford: Yes, the culling of seals.

Seriously, it is a big issue. A gillnet on the bottom of the ocean will stay there. It will never rot out. It will fish for years and years and years. We call them ghost nets. I guess education has to come in. I'm not saying ban the gillnets altogether, but I am suggesting education on how to properly use the gillnets and how to sustain a conservationist fishery.

Mr. Chairman, I agree with you about what we're discussing today, but it's just not tied into what's happening outside the 200-mile limit. It's a broader issue than that. I get nervous and really concerned for the people of Newfoundland and Labrador, because when we all leave here today, when you go back to your individual homes, whether that's in Newfoundland or other parts of Canada, what happens after that? I have no doubt you'll write a good report. I have no doubt about that. But what happens afterward?

That's where we—and I'm not saying you, but all of us, collectively, as Newfoundlanders and Labradorians—have to find a way to create that political will and desire to tackle very serious problems. That is the biggest thing you are going to have to tackle, not writing the report but finding a way to get it acted on.

The Chair: I made note when you were talking earlier, Mr. Efford, on the will not being there to include the best interests of Newfoundland and Labrador, and the fishing industry in particular, in terms of dealing with this problem and interrelated problems. What's your suggestion on trying to instil that will in the central government?

Mr. John Efford: I think it has to begin here at home. I think we've failed miserably. Right here in Newfoundland and Labrador we've become too complacent.

We've accepted defeat. And until we collectively...if we had organized before you came in, and sat down and made one presentation to you--I shouldn't say just one individual, but one message to you--I think it would have been much stronger. I think we have to organize collectively in a manner that the people speak out about what's happening in their communities--not individually, once in a while in front of a camera, once in a while on an official broadcast. It has to be an organized position here in this province to convey that message. Until we take charge of the problem ourselves and find the solution, I don't think it's ever going to change.

· (1350)

The Chair: Okay, I think we talked about that earlier this morning, and I do think we ought to go beyond a report, as I said to the last witness this morning. We do have to figure out some strategy that's common to us all to get the point across.

Is there one last question?

All right then, thank you, Mr. Efford, for your usual forcefulness.

I'll call Mr. Lawrence Felt.

Sorry, we'll go to Mr. Jack Harris, leader of the New Democratic Party of Newfoundland and Labrador.

To start off, I would expect, Jack, you would be tuning up your NDP colleague sitting in the corner for giving such a platform to a Liberal candidate as he did there previously.

Mr. John Efford: I said an extremely hypothetical situation. That's on the record.

The Chair: The floor is yours, Mr. Harris. We do want to tighten up the presentation as much as we can.

Mr. Jack Harris (Leader, New Democratic Party of Newfoundland and Labrador): Thank you, Mr. Chairman, and thank you for taking the important step of having the committee sit here in Newfoundland and Labrador to deal specifically with this issue. It's something that demands action. I'll get into some specifics later.

I'm speaking here as a Newfoundlander and Labradorian, with a legal background as a party leader, but also as a fellow parliamentarian. As you know, I was for a brief period of time--a year and a half--in the House of Commons, and I'm in my twelfth year now as a member of a provincial legislature. I'll get to the point of that a little later, because I know members, parliamentarians generally, are trying to find a better role for themselves in houses of Parliament.

I think one of the important things you can do as parliamentarians and as members of a very important committee is make specific reports and recommendations to the House of Commons that have to be responded to. You know, everybody can vote against your report if they wish, but I think to take action by a committee that is looking seriously at the issue, what the people have to say, what the experts have to say, and what the officials have to say...I think, committee, it's time for Parliament to influence government in a stronger way, and one of the ways you can do that is through this committee.

We just went through a process here where a committee of the House of Assembly went around the province. Mr. Matthews was there in one of the sessions, where we heard evidence and witnesses on the very important issue of what the province should do about the legislation in respect of FPI Limited, which appeared here this morning. We gave a unanimous report at the end of our committee hearing. That unanimous report was adopted by the government, and legislation was passed last week to implement the recommendations of our committee in the case--almost word for word, in respect to aspects of our report. Each item of our report was accepted and put into legislation.

So I think it's a lesson and an exhortation, I suppose, that committees like this, and maybe individual members of the committee, should try to flex their muscles a little bit and be more effective in getting the government, which may be unwilling to move without this kind of process, to move.

I don't agree with Mr. Efford, whom I just heard speak. I don't think it's our business to predict what the government will or will not do, and assume that A, B, C, and D have to be in place before government will act. I'm certainly urging you, as members of this committee, to listen to what you've heard and take the action you deem necessary. I think you will be convinced by what you have heard.

To get specifically to the issue, I just want to read a quote:

In the past, Canada relied upon bilateral diplomatic approaches, (i.e., exchanging resource access for market access) to achieve international compliance with Canadian fishery management objectives. However, the resource is no longer capable of absorbing such trade-offs. Furthermore, the socio-economic impacts associated with foreign overfishing on the “Nose” and “Tail” of the Grand Banks are staggering, particularly for resource dependent communities in the Atlantic Provinces. Increasing numbers of vessel tie-ups and plant closures will have significant and immediate repercussions.

That sounds pretty current, but this is from a report dated January 1990, prepared for the Fisheries Council of Canada by the Oceans Institute of Canada on the issue of managing fishery resources beyond the 200 miles. They put forth a number of options there.

I recommend this report to your committee for review, but it indicates this is not a new problem. I recall raising the issue myself in the House of Commons back in 1987-1988, on the nose and tail of the Grand Banks and the need for Canada to assert its interests and jurisdiction in that area.

The fact of the matter is, the 200-mile limit has not worked for Canada. The reality is, it didn't do it for the fish stocks either. We've seen that the evidence is overwhelming. You have the particulars. I understand you now have a copy of the compliance assessment in the regulatory area that was dealt with in Helsingnor, Denmark, in January.

The facts are pretty startling. I don't need to repeat them. I'm sure you gentlemen--and I see you are all gentlemen here today--have seen the reports. You know the extent of the overfishing and the issue of small mesh sizes being used. The example that pops out is small mesh size and overfishing the 3-0 redfish. This is another debate, I suppose, about where the extra quota might go, but the 10,000-tonne quota of 3-0 redfish Canada now uses itself is not sustainable because of the overfishing of the 3-0 outside of the 200-mile limit.

That's the reality of Canadian interests not being protected offshore. That's only one small example. Redfish, as members may know, is a very slow-growing fish that takes up to 50 years to reach the full growth cycle. We have small meshes that take six or seven years to get to that maturity stage. Even within the 200-mile limit, we have a limit of 22 centimetres for catching. You can't fish under 22 centimetres, but the females don't even get to maturity until 27 or 28 centimetres. So even inside our own jurisdiction, we have improper regulations to protect fish.

I want to talk about offshore, because this is the important point. We're getting to a crunch. We have the evidence, and some of it is rather startling. I want to read one example. You heard this on February 28 from Mr. Patrick Chamut, who appeared before you.

The example he referred to was a situation with a vessel that fished for two or three months in the Grand Banks and caught 625 tonnes of fish. Of the total, 50 tonnes represented legitimate regulated species--Greenland halibut and skate. Only 8% of the catch was legitimate, and 92% represented species under moratorium.

· (1355)

This country is still fishing outside the 200-mile limit. This happens time and time again. The assessment shows that some of the vessels--I'm not sure how many countries--submitted no observer reports in 2000 and 2001, and they're still fishing. So countries that haven't submitted observation reports are allowed to go back and fish the next year, and the next year, and the next year. What kind of satisfactory mechanism is that for the protection and conservation of the species?

We've seen reports from Helsingnor of countries voting, out of self-interest, against the conservation advice. Under that rubric and under the organization of NAFO, we've now come to the point where we're able to say, based on these reports and the experience of the last 10 years, that when Canada takes unilateral action--and I'm referring to the Estai--we see a significant dip in the activities of foreign nations, and when we don't, up she goes again.

So we have clear evidence that unilateral action is required, and in international law, the justification can be found in the report that was submitted by Canada. The justification is there, and I think this committee can go a long way by putting the initiative before Parliament and asking Parliament to insist that the government act to protect the specific Canadian interest for conservation reasons, as trustees of this resource off our coast.

Newfoundland and Labrador, of course, have the most significant interest in this. There's been mention of Confederation and the fact that with Confederation came this resource. We didn't bring it for Canada to trade away, or trade its willingness to protect this resource away, for other advantages for central Canada or other parts of Canada. It is not a resource we brought to this country to see destroyed for other interests of the government and people of Canada.

There's an obligation, both under international law and morally, for this country to take specific action to protect the fish stock and what's going on inside. I agree with John Efford that we should push the limit of international law as far as we can, with respect to the limit. I think all you really need under international law is a legal basis and a willingness to act. State you're doing it, act as if you're doing it in accordance with the law, and get that accepted. That should be pursued.

I think your committee has to look at this in steps. The first step must be for Canadians to assert custodial management of not just the nose and tail of the Grand Banks, but the Flemish Cap, to make sure these stocks are not destroyed. There's lots of evidence of that. There's also lots of evidence that when Canada acts unilaterally, things get better. That's really my finishing point.

As fellow parliamentarians and individual members of the House of Commons, you have an opportunity here to act as strongly as you can to influence what the Government of Canada does. I know Foreign Affairs is reluctant to do these things, and perhaps DFO is reluctant to do these things. I'm not going to predict whether they will or won't. I want them to have enough impetus to act because of this important public policy issue, this important resource.

Others have spoken much more eloquently about what it does and doesn't do for the people of Newfoundland and Labrador. We're all aware of the recent census statistics and the decline in population of this province. I know this is not exclusive to Newfoundland and Labrador fishing areas. People are leaving agricultural areas as well, but for different reasons.

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The principal and prime reason for the exodus from this province over the last 10 years has been the groundfish collapse and the consequences of the moratoria. That's the difference. There are public policies that can be changed to stop the destruction outside the 200-mile limit resource, and also put Canada back in the position of acting properly and strongly in international affairs for the benefit of conservation issues and the environment. And certainly there is self-interest there as well.

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The Chair: Thank you very much, Mr. Harris.

Loyola, the other day one of the local papers was passed around here with the census in it, showing how each rural town went down. Some went up, but most of them went down. Would it be possible for us to get a copy of that? I had intended to try to get a copy that day.

Mr. Loyola Hearn: I have that note already, Mr. Chairman.

The Chair: We'll need that. I think it was very specific.

We'll start with Mr. Burton.

Mr. Andy Burton: Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

Just very quickly, Mr. Harris, we've heard custodial management mentioned by a number of different presenters. What's your vision of that? How would it work, in your view? How would we pay for that in order to extend it beyond the 200 miles?

Mr. Jack Harris: Custodial management, as I see it, is where we set ourselves up as trustees--a de facto custodian of the resource--and we establish the rules and enforce them. You're going to have difficulty taxing the players, but that's the way to go. If you set the rules, and the rules involve them having access to this resource and there's a cost of management, then compliance with the regulations could also involve compliance with the cost of doing it.

Mr. Andy Burton: I have a supplementary, if I may. This is somewhat similar, in my mind, to what we have with NAFO now, and that's not working. We obviously have to improve upon that.

Mr. Jack Harris: The reason it's not working is that enforcement is left to the member nations. Clearly, they feel they can flagrantly violate the regulations and rules. They can go and vote the quotas, and participate. The conservationists can be outnumbered by those with self-interest.

It fails on two levels. It fails because the rule setting is not in compliance with scientific advice and because the enforcement is left to the nations that are violating it for their own benefit. They are not enforcing it. Clearly, if you can be as flagrant as they have been, if you can fail to file your reports and still go fishing out of these countries, then it's just not being taken seriously.

The Chair: Thank you, Mr. Harris, Mr. Burton.

Monsieur Roy.

[Translation]

Mr. Jean-Yves Roy: Thank you, Mr. Chair.

I thank you for your presentation, but I do not remember you saying that Canada should leave NAFO immediately, given that it does not work. That's my first question.

Do you want Canada to leave NAFO immediately, given that we have been a part of it for 25 years and that it doesn't work and that it will probably never work because the member countries, those who participate are there, in the end, only to protect their own interests? As a witness showed us this morning, there is a rule that allows this and in a very easy way.

[English]

Mr. Jack Harris: Exactly how one would do it is an important question, clearly. How one gets to custodial management, whether it's just by unilateral declaration, whether the steps include removal from NAFO, or presenting an ultimatum to NAFO as a first step, is to me a technical, diplomatic question. I know we're committed at this point to going back to further meetings in September. It may not be something you want to do next week. It may be something that you plan for a year, go back to NAFO and lay on the table an ultimatum of some sort as to what needs to be done. These are steps that I would leave to the diplomatic people as to how to get from here to there. Leaving NAFO may be part of that. At what stage you do it, I would leave that to somebody else.

The Chair: Thank you, Mr. Roy.

Mr. Stoffer.

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Mr. Peter Stoffer: Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Thanks, Jack, and thanks to your office as well for giving us copies of the Canadian assessment; it's most helpful for our report.

The Minister of Fisheries and the official opposition fisheries critic and now yourself have more or less indicated that what Canada should do on behalf of Newfoundland and Labrador is take some sort of an action now. Don't wait, but take action now in order to protect and preserve the stocks off the nose and tail and the Flemish Cap. Is that a correct assessment of what you're saying here today?

Mr. Jack Harris: Yes, absolutely. I think we've got to see a specific action, a strong action, a clear action indicating that Canada does not intend to play footsie with this process for the next ten years, because that's unfortunately what we're doing. We're objecting.

I think people were in a way surprised that the Canadian government came on so strong at NAFO in the last meetings in January. I think people were pleasantly surprised. But with the evidence they have, the clear indication is that the graph of violations, which went down with unilateral action and then up again when we stopped taking action, is indicative that we should actually do more.

Mr. Peter Stoffer: Have you had a chance on a formal basis to ask the Minister of Fisheries or the premier of the province to work with other provinces in Atlantic Canada at the first ministers level, as our chairman indicated earlier today, to bring this issue to the premiers' level in order then to bring it up to the prime ministerial level? Have you had a chance or are you going to be preparing in the future to ask the premier of the province to do that?

Mr. Jack Harris: Yes. I think this is something that could be done on a number of different levels. Clearly the premier of this province and the other Atlantic provinces and Quebec and British Columbia as well would have an interest in how tough Canada is prepared to be in asserting its role in protecting the offshore fishery resource. So that's another avenue. I think we haven't done that, and that's something we will do.

You folks have the direct.... You sit down in the House of Commons with the Prime Minister, and some of you sit in the caucus with the Prime Minister, and you have an opportunity to influence your colleagues in the House of Commons to support a motion. I'm encouraging you to have a separate report on this very issue. I understand you can go around here and say you've had a wonderful time and heard all sorts of interesting things, but you don't have to report on this. It might be useful to have a separate report on this issue alone, with some very specific recommendations that highlight the importance to you as a committee. If you can then be persuasive with your colleagues and your caucuses and in the House of Commons, then that's the direct approach as far as I'm concerned.

The individual premiers, of course, would have some influence with the Prime Minister; I don't know how much. But I guess the more provinces are interested in an issue, the more force it would have. So we'll certainly pursue that in our legislature, and I'm assuming you're going to encourage your colleagues in Nova Scotia to do the same thing.

The Chair: This, for your information, will be basically a separate report on this issue. But why we've been pushing a little bit that the first ministers be involved as well is that we don't want to give anyone the opportunity of saying “Oh, that's only the fisheries committee”; we want it to be very broadly based so that it backs up and adds to and supplements our argument.

Anything else?

Mr. Peter Stoffer: One last question. If at September's meeting it doesn't go the way Canada indicates it wants it to go, what should we do in October?

Mr. Jack Harris: Well, I'm sure there's a level of caution within the DFO group and the people who've been working on this assessment and the expectations for September. I think if it doesn't go the way we want, that may be the opportunity, the trigger, or the straw that broke the camel's back and allow us to take specific unilateral action. So perhaps we shouldn't do anything before September, but that may provide us with an opportunity or jumping-off point for strong action.

Mr. Peter Stoffer: Okay. I also--

The Chair: I thought that was your last.

Mr. Peter Stoffer: It's sort of a comment, if I may.

The Chair: Okay, let's hear it.

Mr. Peter Stoffer: We've heard from Mr. Matthews and Mr. Hearn, who represent Newfoundland, and from others as well the impact this has on the people and the children and the families of rural Newfoundland.

Jack, when we're in Ottawa and we read the central papers, we hear about the fact that Newfoundland's growth is 4%, leading the economy in terms of GDP growth. That's good for St. John's, but we've heard from people who are saying that rural Newfoundland is on its knees right now. How do we get that message to central Canadians and to the government?

Mr. Jack Harris: That's a real good question. We just spent two and a half weeks going around to ten communities in Newfoundland and Labrador and we heard first-hand. Bill was there in Fortune on February 9 or 10. We went to these places and the message was loud and clear. Some of it got across through the television to national TV, but it's a hard story to tell. It's easier to grab headlines saying other things, negative things.

The story you can bring to the House of Commons is what you've heard here and how you interpret issues such as the decline of population. I think that's an important role that you can play, and say people think everyone's leaving Newfoundland and Labrador, and there are reasons for that. It has to do with what kind of a job the Canadian government has been doing in managing offshore resources. I think that's part of the message you can bring back.

The Chair: Thank you, Mr. Harris.

Just on that point, when Mr. Etchegary was before the committee this morning, this point really struck home with me. I think there is a view in central Canada that the only thing we do in Atlantic Canada is draw EI, which is the wrong view. It's a perception out there, and we fight that a lot. But he said that in 1988 there were 6,500 people employed between basically two areas up the coast for 50 weeks a year. And then he went through the numbers, how few there are working in that area today. I think that's pretty startling when you go back to 1988 and there were 6,500 people working, employed 50 weeks a year, compared to what we have now. I mean, that tells you what a healthy fishery can do.

Mr. Jack Harris: Yes, and that's what we heard all along.

The other thing that people need to know is that the reason there are fewer people here is because they've gone elsewhere to work--not to laze about. They've gone elsewhere to work; that's why they're not here. If they wanted to sit around and not work they could stay here and not work, because there's lots of no work around, if that's what they want. But they want to work, so they're in Alberta, they're in British Columbia, they're in Ontario, they're in Manitoba. They're there working, supporting their families. They brought their families with them and they're having their own families there. That's why we've got a fertility rate of 1.2 per female when it takes 2.1 to maintain your population, because our young families are off working somewhere else. We have a work culture here in Newfoundland and Labrador.

The Chair: Thank you.

Mr. Hearn.

Mr. Loyola Hearn: Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

There's one thing I wanted Jack to comment on, but before that, the gross domestic product that Peter mentioned has come up a couple of times--you know, how come you can have such a poor face when we talk around tables like this, when stats show you are leading the country and have for the last couple of years? These figures are very deceptive. The GDP, of course, is measured by the value of our products, and most of the upbeat figures you see for the last two or three years come from the development of the offshore oil plus our shrimp and crab fisheries.

The offshore oil we benefit very little from. It's pumped out of the ground on the Grand Banks and carried off somewhere else.

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For our power in Labrador, which is very valuable, we get about $10 million a year. Quebec gets about $1 billion from the same resource. Yet it's listed on our books as being an asset to us.

Of course, with the shrimp fishery, most of it is caught by the big freezer trawlers that take it directly to some other country for processing.

So in value, yes, we have tremendous resources. The benefit from them, however, doesn't translate down to the average citizen. That's why we're no better off today--in fact, perhaps we're worse off--than we were in the past.

This morning there was an interesting question raised in relation to the control of the seabed. It says within the economic zone,

a. sovereign rights for the purpose of exploring and exploiting, conserving and managing the natural resources, whether living or non-living, of the waters superjacent to the sea-bed and of the sea-bed and its subsoil, and with regard....

Within the economic zone, the coastal state has that control. Outside the economic zone, on the nose and tail apparently, we do have control of the seabed, what's under it and what's on it, the sedentary species, not what swims above it. Unfortunately, this is what's been raised. The question raised by a fisherman here this morning was that in order for them to catch these species, the main way of fishing is dragging, which means they drag their heavy doors and the associated gear over this seabed, which we are supposed to have control over, doing all kinds of damage, including damage to the sedentary species.

Is this a possible avenue of exploration? Of course, exploring where and how long is the big question. Apparently, though, this hasn't been raised before.

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Mr. Jack Harris: Well, there's no limit to the ingenuity of ordinary people to raise matters that end up being supreme legal points. Certainly, if you want to control the seabed, that may be one avenue to do it, but I would guess you might have to say.... You can stop it from dragging your seabed, but if the reason for doing that is based on something else, you might not be able to....

I don't know if there's a quick fix for this in international law. From reading international law in terms of what's been agreed upon, I believe it moves in strange and mysterious ways. You don't have to have supreme consensus for something. You have to have a legal rationale for taking action and be able to take action that sticks.

I think the development of international law has included a lot of treaty-based activity. For instance, NAFO itself is a treaty-based activity. But if the treaty basis does not succeed in protecting a resource, and if unilateral action is an avenue to pursue, then I'm sure the Government of Canada has access to a lot of people to see whether that should be pursued and can be pursued as a mechanism to assert fisheries jurisdiction over the entire continental shelf.

The Chair: Mr. Hearn, that closes it.

Are there any further questions?

Thank you very much, Mr. Harris.

We will now call on Mayor Hewitt from the town of Trepassey. Accompanying him, I believe, is Mr. Sutton.

Welcome, gentlemen. The town of Trepassey has come up many times in the discussion over the last couple of days.

The floor is yours, Tony, so go ahead.

Mr. Tony Hewitt (Mayor of Trepassey): First of all, I'd like to introduce myself. I'm Tony Hewitt, the mayor of Trepassey. Accompanying me today to help me with this presentation is one of our community volunteers, Wilfred Sutton, who has been very active in community development over the past 12 years, ever since our plant closure.

We're presenting two different packages. The green package is a profile on Trepassey, and the other package, I think, is black and will include our presentation for today. It's going to be in two parts: Wilf will be making the first part of the presentation and I'll be concluding at the end.

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The Chair: Thank you. Go ahead, Wilfred.

Mr. Wilfred Sutton (Concerned Citizen, Town of Trepassey): Thank you, Tony. Thank you, Mr. Chairman, and thank you for having us.

This being the tenth anniversary since the collapse of the cod fishery, and the twelfth anniversary since Trepassey's fish plant closure, we felt it fitting to reflect and voice an opinion to your committee. Again, we thank you for that opportunity.

As a starting point, I would like to refer to a recent radio interview that we found very interesting and relevant. On the morning of January 18, 2002, Jim Brown of CBC Radio was speaking with Dr. Tony Charles of St. Mary's University. Dr. Charles, one of Canada's leading fishery experts, had just completed a genuine progress index fish accounts report on the fishery collapse for GPI Atlantic.

GPI Atlantic is a non-profit research group founded in 1997 to develop an index of sustainable development and well-being, or a genuine progress index. According to its website, its goal is to produce a measure of economic progress that reflects social and environmental well-being more accurately than traditional economic growth statistics like the gross domestic product.

In-kind support is provided by Statistics Canada, and what is measured, apparently, is what we value as a society. The contention is, if critical social and ecological assets are not counted and valued in our measures of progress, they receive insufficient attention in the policy arena.

In the report or interview, Dr. Charles suggested that Ottawa must adopt new ways to measure the health of ocean fisheries. He said:

It's no longer enough merely to count fish landings and plant production. Policy planners must also consider the health of the ocean environment and the well-being of coastal communities.

It was the words, “the well-being of coastal communities” that really got our attention, as we remember and reflect upon the Trepassey experience.

Now, we're not exactly sure what Dr. Charles meant when he spoke about the well-being of coastal communities, but the following thoughts about our community were the ones his words evoked in us...and are what we want to share with you today. Sadly, our words may lack magic solutions, but in our opinion they are worthy of note.

By way of introduction, Trepassey is a community situated on the tip of Newfoundland's Avalon peninsula. It was a fishing port that historically depended on both the inshore and offshore for its survival. It hosted the Fishery Products International deep sea plant for close on 30 to 40 years, which traditionally harvested the groundfish from the nose and tail of the Grand Banks.

The plant, which was the mainstay of the region's economy and employed some 700-plus at times, was announced for permanent closure in 1990. In May of 1990, when the Atlantic fisheries adjustment program was announced, Trepassey, like other communities first struck at that time, was allocated community diversification funding as part of a $584 million federal program called the fisheries adjustment program.

Trepassey was to receive $7 million over a five-year term. Of the $7 million, $900,000 was designated as administration funds over five years and the balance of $6.1 million was designated as an investment fund over five years. In July 1990, a seven-member Trepassey community development fund committee was formed and given the enormous task of trying to diversify our economy. This task was embraced with great apprehension and enthusiasm, and indeed hope, by the participating volunteers and the community. However, in hindsight, we probably lacked realistic planning, and we failed to develop any comprehensive community vision.

With regard to our diversification effort, throughout the ensuing contract, great efforts were made by staff, by government representatives, by community volunteers, to attract new businesses to our area. Indeed, many of the interested proponents found Trepassey. Thus, in many cases it was a reactive community economic development process rather than a proactive community-focused approach to development.

We had some success, but we achieved little to replace the jobs in the fishery.

Cognizant of the need to be open-minded and positive, a community delegation in 1992 even travelled to Norway to explore how our community might fit into the developing oil and gas industry on the east coast. In hindsight, it seems that although a community built around the fishery, we hadn't the foresight, the bonding, the direction, or support to stick with what we knew. In fact, investment spending on the fish plant and the fishery infrastructure was restricted. And we wonder now, was that policy sensitive to our reality and to our well-being?

Most disconcerting of all, when the five years were up, our town still had over $1 million remaining in the investment fund. We had no government-approved plan for its usage. In fairness to the staff and to the volunteers, this was viewed as a matter of prudence and probably exemplified the scrutiny the proposal assessments received. We believe it was indeed a measure of our accountability as a community. It's noteworthy, however, that even though it was called the Trepassey Fund, government never really let it go, as every dollar had to receive the spending approval of bureaucrats who lived outside our region. And that was an important point.

Then, as governments go and contracts end, the remaining funds had to be returned to the federal treasury. Our opposition as a community was to no avail, and it seemed no one could prevent it. The mandate of the fund, small as it was, why it was provided in the first place, and what had been accomplished in Trepassey, and the enormity of the work remaining seemed to get overlooked. In our opinion, Trepassey, a coastal community and a region with an historic attachment and undisputed adjacency to one of the greatest ocean environments in the world--the Grand Banks of Newfoundland--had its recovery hopes further devastated. The well-being of a coastal community seemed to get forgotten.

Trepassey continues to plan for its survival, and although hard times continue to fall on many parts of this province, especially the rural parts, we can point to a small manufacturing base that grew from our early efforts. Currently we boast a marine lighting manufacturing plant, a vinyl window manufacturing plant, and a water bottling facility. And we hope to build on those successes. The social and economic well-being of our community, the upkeep of our community and its industrial infrastructure, and our efforts as community volunteers to attract potential investors could be so much better if the funding allotment first promised in 1990 had been permitted to stay with us.

Mapping our future--Trepassey's Strategic Development Plan, completed in January 2000, reflects a community compilation of strategies and initiatives that are aimed at creating a community atmosphere we hope and think is conducive to a long-term community development and empowerment. Our continued efforts in community sustainability, now with a community development officer in place and a community-driven focus on our possibilities and indeed our challenges in the historic Irish Loop region, could definitely be much more effective if that diversification purse hadn't been taken back.

Committed funds for community diversification need to be just that. It may take years for one-industry towns to find and invest in appropriate alternatives--that is, if there's any hope at all.

Secondly, lapsing an allocated diversification fund because of a contract expiry date may fit fine with policy planners, but it does little to help a hurting community to trust and plan for its survival.

I'll pass it over to Mayor Tony now to continue with the remainder of the points.

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Mr. Tony Hewitt: It was for these reasons that Dr. Tony Charles' words rang so true for our community. Yes, indeed, “Policy planners must also consider the health of the ocean environment and the well-being of coastal communities.” If we continue to measure prosperity by market statistics alone--remember, Newfoundland and Labrador have topped Canada's economic growth indicators for two or three consecutive years--and ignore the holistic well-being aspect, once-vibrant coastal communities like Trepassey will continue to remain areas for further study and reflection only. Therefore, it is imperative that we try to ensure the well-being of coastal communities.

Previously allocated diversification funding should stay in place and be made available to at least enable these communities to maintain the service of the community development officer. This will ensure the facilitation, the continuation, of community capacity-building initiatives and the championing of economic initiatives at the community level. Community development needs someone on the ground, living in the community, to do the legwork. It will not happen by itself. Strong, solid communities are built from the inside out by the people who live within them and not the other way around.

As well--and some of these points we have heard over and over again--it's important that Canada and NAFO take appropriate steps to prevent the overfishing so recently documented.

We support the premise that the nose and the tail of the Grand Banks should be included in Canada's jurisdiction. Without a resource, no fishing community or company will survive.

Efforts to remove the 20% tariff imposed by the European Union on Canadian imports of cooked and peeled shrimp should be increased and supported so that Canadian producers can compete fairly on a level playing field with our non-EU competitors.

There should be dedication, enhanced support, and direction for research and development within the established businesses currently operating in struggling communities. Dedicated marketing assistance should also be a focused priority.

The recommendation contained in the recent report of the Special Panel on Corporate Concentration in the Newfoundland and Labrador Fishing Industry, to ensure some reasonable balance between regional resource availability and regional processing capacity in a regional economic development context, should be implemented.

The transfer of shrimp and redfish quotas to other provinces, Prince Edward Island and Nova Scotia, for example, should not be supported while processing equipment here remains idle. Yes, we recognize the importance of cost efficiency and market fundamentals, but let us not overlook the fundamentals in maintaining our communities and the reasons we chose to settle here. The principle of adjacency must be forever paramount and adopted to assist with community self-sufficiency and economic viability, long after the full recovery of all stocks.

The effects of seismic testing on stock recovery requires continued study.

The possible harvesting on spawning grounds should be of major concern.

The support of aquaculture initiatives and continued research into the utilization of all marine byproducts must continue. New fisheries exploration and new product development is crucial to an expanded and diversified industry.

The recent Fishery Products International Limited Act hearings and the uproar about saving communities should serve to bring the plight of all hurting communities to the forefront. The time and need for community planning and diversification initiatives is always current.

The older workers who fell through the age criteria cracks under the previous adjustment program should be given a full review. At present, thanks only to the ongoing efforts of Ms. Flo Yetman of St. John's, former employee of the south side, who has made representation to the Canadian Human Rights Commission, some of our residents still await this as a final hope for justice.

The Canada Pension Plan disability benefit should have the restrictions that may prevent unemployed former fishery workers from qualifying removed.

There should be a governmental responsibility to help communities clean up and secure former fish plant structures. Our former FPI site is a national eyesore. Newspapers and media from all over the country and the United States have placed it in front of the eyes of the world. Trepassey has attempted some cleanup, but how can a community with its very economic heart torn out be expected to bear such costs? Furthermore, it's unhealthy, unethical, and indeed an insult to former fishery workers who have given their lives to this industry to have to look at the deteriorating remnants on a daily basis. Make no mistake about it, the very health of a community and its people has been impacted by the havoc of stock depletion and fishery failure.

There should be increased assistance for the upkeep of existing fishery infrastructure for the inshore workers still trying to hack a living from around our shores. The Trepassey Harbour Authority in 2001 received funding to build floating docks, but insufficient funds to place them in the water. Also, the proposed boat basin, necessary to protect fishers' vessel investments during lay time, and the lack of support to develop it is a concern. The passing of responsibilities over to Small Craft Harbours brought with it little funding to address demonstrated port needs.

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Finally, we again wish to say a sincere word of thanks for listening to our remarks. We trust some of what we have presented here will help fashion the policy statements of the future. The well-being of our community and others similar to it depends on the dedication and expertise of all of us working together to make our coastal communities survive and prosper.

Also, in concluding, I would like to thank our MP, Loyola Hearn, for his time, efforts, and dedication to Trepassey in letting us come here today to put our concerns before this committee.

Thank you very much.

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The Chair: Thank you very much, Mr. Hewitt and Mr. Sutton, for a presentation that a heck of a lot of work obviously went into.

Turning to questions, then, Mr. Burton.

Mr. Andy Burton: It's not really a question, Mr. Chairman, just a short statement.

I'm a west coast MP. I come from a small-town background. I was mayor of a small community for a number of years in an area that's been devastated by the downturn in our resource-based industries, mainly mining and logging. I certainly understand the concerns you have and how difficult it is to maintain a viable community when the resource that you count on to create the income for your people is gone.

I don't have the solution, but I hear you. I understand exactly where you're at. And certainly, any expertise that I have will be passed on to this committee. If there are solutions out there, we'll certainly try to find them. But I really, truly understand where you're coming from.

The Chair: Thank you, Mr. Burton.

Mr. Lunney.

Mr. James Lunney: Thank you, Mr. Chair.

We've heard a lot about Trepassey, so we appreciate your presence here today to tell us a little bit about the community, what your history is, what you've been through, and what currently is going on there. I notice in your presentation you say that for 30 or 40 years you've traditionally harvested groundfish from the nose and tail of the Grand Banks.

Could you please explain something about your traditional relationship? Is it a particular part of the Grand Banks that for some reason your town is connected to, or is it the Grand Banks in general, including the nose and tail?

Mr. Tony Hewitt: The Grand Banks, I guess, including the nose and tail. But Trepassey is the closest community to the nose and the tail of the Grand Banks, and for 30 or 40 years, that's what Trepassey made its living on. To then have it just wiped away from us is not fair. Right now, Trepassey is in a situation where we're completely out of the fishery. That's our dilemma now--how we can get back into what was so rightfully ours for years.

Mr. James Lunney: Maybe it would help to clarify this. It's probably a simplistic question, but as somebody who is not from the region, am I correct in assuming that the terms “nose” and “tail” didn't come into play until the 200-mile limit came in, and these areas were just outside it? Is that correct, or are these terms that were used for a long time?

The Chair: That's correct. But maybe Loyola or....

Mr. Loyola Hearn: I guess the terms were used. But more specifically, when the limit came in, because it took in certain parts of the banks except points that really looked like a nose and tail, it helped clarify the areas that were not included within the 200-mile limit.

The Chair: I think, Mr. Lunney, if you go to the map, you'll see it. We used to have a big map, but George Baker stole it. It used to be a huge map that we would carry. Anyway, George has it somewhere, I'm sure.

Mr. Roy.

[Translation]

Mr. Jean-Yves Roy: Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.

I was also, as Mr. Burton was saying, the mayor of a small municipality, in my prime, in my younger days, and we lived through difficult situations.

I want to get back to your presentation but I would like to have more details because, obviously, I don't know your city. I would like to know what the joblessness rate is at the moment. I'm not talking about the unemployment rate, because we are well aware that that is a Statistics Canada survey. I am talking about the actual percentage of the population which finds itself jobless.

If I understood correctly, it is a city of 100,000 inhabitants at the moment. I would like to know what the impact was on the population, what was the decrease in the population as a result of the groundfish crisis. I would also like to know what the impact was in terms of incomes of the citizens. I don't know if you have numbers to give us on that, but I would like to know what the ramifications were in terms of lowered incomes for the citizens. In your opinion, what is the poverty rate in your city as a result of the groundfish crisis?

I have one last question, if the Chair will allow me. You said that you had to give a million dollars back to the government because you were unable to spend it and, obviously, you said that each penny was controlled by the officials. If I have understood correctly, you had an army of officials on your back for each penny you had to spend, so, therefore you could not intervene in an way that was as effective as you would have wished.

This million dollars, how would you have used it if you could have had it?

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[English]

The Chair: There are a lot of questions there, Tony, but take a stab at it.

Mr. Tony Hewitt: First of all, the population of Trepassey, when our plant was up and swinging, was anywhere from 1,600 to 1,700. Right now our population is down to 889, so it's basically cut in half. I wouldn't say all of our young, but the majority of our young are moving on and seeking work in Alberta or elsewhere. We do have a couple of manufacturing companies that do employ, between the three of them, close on 50 people. They do make a relatively good wage at that.

In 1989, the last year when Fishery Products operated, the payroll for that year was $13 million. It's hard now for the town of Trepassey, losing that tax base and half our revenue, to keep everything up and keep going.

You mentioned the $1 million the government took back from us. At the time when we were given $7 million, we didn't have the insight we have now. Over the last couple of years we developed our own community economic development plan, and that plan started from the grassroots up, from the input from the local people, to the community, to getting everybody involved. We were successful in doing our plan, and the plan was designed and done by one of our local residents.

We have a development officer in place. However, our development officer has funding only for another year. If we had that $1 million we could put aside for that person to work on initiatives for Trepassey, there are a lot of things out there--and we're not sure what's really out there, but if we had a development officer...we need somebody to do the legwork for us. A volunteer can't be expected to be doing it all.

I don't know if my counterpart, Wilf, would like to come and add to this.

Mr. Wilfred Sutton: With regard to the $1 million that was returned to the federal treasury, what we meant in our report was that, at the time, between 1991 and 1996, as we said in the report, there were a lot of people coming to us with business ideas. In a way, we spent our whole time reacting to people knocking on our doors. It was like we were sitting around the cash box.

We didn't get the time, and didn't take the time, until really in 1998, when all the money had gone back and we were sitting around with really no focus, to really sit down and start talking among ourselves as a community and to see what the people in the community were talking about in terms of what we could be doing for community development.

We didn't come up with any great magic solutions to anything. But we did come up with listening to ourselves for a change, and some of the stuff we came up with was pretty simple, but it made it a lot clearer for us when we got it put on paper in terms of being able to look at it and say this is what our community said we should be doing.

One thing we were told we should be doing was trying to market our town. It was for these reasons that it was only in 1999 or 2000 that we actually got this kind of little promotional package together.

This type of thing may not save us, but to me it's kind of a resumé for our community. If we're going to try to attract people to our area, it's nice to be able to show people what we have to offer.

With regard to the $1 million, granted it's gone back, and that's fine, but there are a few things that we didn't mention along the way because it's been a long time. It's been 10 years. We sold our fish plant to an Italian company back in 1995, I think it was. They took over the plant for about three years. The refrigeration machinery in the plant was dismantled and shipped away to Tanzania. We even provided training to some local residents back in 1995-96, an orientation to Tanzanian culture, with the intention that they were going to go down there and install the equipment, and train people to work on our equipment and with our fishing techniques.

Then the plant was sold, and it was sold in a community kind of a way at a public meeting. There was a promise held out to us that this Italian company would be setting up a furniture manufacturing facility in the structure that was the fish plant. So people let it go, and it was like we were letting go of the last thing we had in terms of anything to do with the fishery.

Then two or three years went by and it came around to 1998-99, and we couldn't even make a telephone call to Tannol Holdings. They wouldn't even return our calls. The plant was continuing to fall down. The roof was caved in. There were people coming from all around the area to vandalize it and rob bits and pieces of stainless steel and aluminum, and that kind of thing. So it became a real headache for the community.

After a long while and some other goings on with regard to people who were proposing different things they could do with the facility if they had it, we did end up being successful in getting the facility back. We managed to buy it back with the dollars we had received from the sale of it. So we ended up with about $400,000 back to the town, which we continued to hold onto after we got the plant back.

With money we bought the plant back with we decided, as a community, that we would take $75,000 from that and look into working with HRDC to put a community development officer in place, which we did under the local labour market partnership agreement. That development officer is from the area. She is presently into about the 14th month of what we hope to be her three-year term under the local labour market partnership agreement. But that's never a certainty.

So what we're saying is that's a concern for us, but there are good things happening at the local level in the community right now because of the efforts we made at the community level, such as to get those types of things together and get this plan in place. Some of the things we're doing might be as simple as bringing us together and trying to start putting some dollars together to replace the fire truck. That's community development. We're doing that kind of thing.

Other little bits and pieces of things might not mean a whole lot to a major centre, but when you're living in a community of 800 or 900 people, a fire truck is an important part of what makes us tick. Being able to do that and not having to worry about where we're going to get the funds to keep the development officer in place in 2003...it's really a stress we don't need. If we had the money that was allotted to us in the first place, hopefully we'd be able to use that type of funding to plan for the continuation of this position, and to plan to attract people who might be interested to our area.

We have some people who are interested. In the past six months we've had some delegations from China come in with regard to different things. They have other possibilities that might help us out in the near term, and hopefully that will become a reality. But piecing it all together takes a long while, and a few dollars to help with the basics around the community, in trying to support it, helps.

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I guess for me it's like digging up bones. But when money is allocated to you and then after five years taken back, and we're still not where we need to be, it's hard to accept that as a sound community development practice.

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The Chair: Let me turn to Mr. Roy.

You're not alone. I have a community that lost 600 jobs and had a $20 million fund that lost $5 million.

I would say--and Loyola's probably aware of this anyway--under the strategic community investment fund with ACOA, there are probably also some possibilities that need to be looked into. We've found that fund to be very good, for the particular community I'm thinking of. It certainly can be looked into.

Mr. Roy.

[Translation]

Mr. Jean-Yves Roy: Thank you, Mr. Chair.

You were probably here today and you probably heard a multitude of intervenors, but how would you reply to the following question? What would you want done immediately to solve the problem of the Grand Banks, for example? You, as mayor right next to the site, what would you want to be done tomorrow morning to resolve the problem?

[English]

Mr. Tony Hewitt: That's a hard question to answer. More enforcement definitely has to be put in place. Stricter guidelines have to be put in place. I'm kind of stuck, to be honest, on that question.

The Chair: That's not a problem, Tony. You can think about it. If you have anything further to add later, we can come back to it.

Mr. Cuzner.

Mr. Rodger Cuzner: Just for clarification, the town now owns the former fish plant.

Mr. Tony Hewitt: Correct.

Mr. Rodger Cuzner: What state of repair is the fish plant in now, and is there still some equipment available?

Mr. Tony Hewitt: On the state of our plant now, it's more or less a shell. There's no equipment or anything left in the building. As a matter of fact, it's deteriorating. There's no roof left on it. In order for it to be turned back into a viable fish plant, millions of dollars would have to be put back into it.

Mr. Rodger Cuzner: Do you have an inshore fleet that fishes out of Trepassey? Is there a lobster industry there? Do you have inshore fishermen?

Mr. Tony Hewitt: We have inshore fishermen, yes.

Mr. Rodger Cuzner: About how many licence holders would you have there?

Mr. Tony Hewitt: There are probably 30 or 40.

Mr. Rodger Cuzner: From your presentation, I would imagine you'd join with Mr. Etchegary and commend Minister Thibault for his decision to not transfer the quota, and to refrain from transferring the quota to the town of Canso as well.

You also identified aquaculture. Are there any initiatives right now on aquaculture in your community?

Mr. Tony Hewitt: Right now, as a matter of fact--and hopefully it will be as early as mid April--a Chinese company is interested in doing some aquaculture in Trepassey. It's a Chinese company. A lot of testing has to be done to see if our harbours are suitable for that, but it is something we're looking into.

Mr. Rodger Cuzner: When you read through your brochure, the first things that come to mind are the quality of the water and the natural harbour sort of thing. Those things are attractive to aquaculture operations, obviously.

Your proximity is the same, when we refer to the nose and tail. Do you do any servicing of any of the foreign fleets? Earlier, there was talk of recommending closing ports to some of these foreign vessels. Do you guys in Trepassey currently do anything like that?

Mr. Tony Hewitt: No.

Mr. Rodger Cuzner: Okay, thanks.

The Chair: Thank you, Mr. Cuzner.

Mr. Stoffer.

Mr. Peter Stoffer: Thank you very much.

Gentlemen, thank you for your presentation. Last year a group of farmers came from Saskatchewan to Ottawa, and a gentleman actually drove a combine from B.C. to Ottawa. There was a 12-year-old boy sitting in the room, and I asked him if he planned to get into the agriculture business to be a farmer when he got older. He said no. Then I asked him what about all the kids in his school. He said nobody in the school that he knew of planned to be a farmer in the future.

If I were at a school in Trepassey and there were 12-year-old kids there, if I asked them who there planned to be a fisherman or work in the fishing industry when they got older, how many of them would raise their hands?

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Mr. Tony Hewitt: I would say very few, for the simple reason that they know right now the situation that Trepassey is in. It's hard for me to say this, but they would say maybe there's not a future in the fishery.

However, I'd have to disagree with what I just said, for the simple reason that Trepassey has made its living for 30 to 40 years, all its life, on the fishery. In order for Trepassey to survive again, and to come up, we will have to in some way play a role in the fishery.

Mr. Peter Stoffer: That's a theme we've heard, I think, throughout the day. In fact, the Mayor of Burgeo stressed that extremely well yesterday when he said fishing is your history and fishing is your future.

What can we as a committee tell the Prime Minister of these children and the future families of Trepassey and the Irish Loop--and I should, by the way, say happy St. Patrick's day weekend to you both, and to your community--so that he in turn, when he's quoted in the papers and the media, can tell these children and the future families of Newfoundland and Labrador that there will be a future in the fishery? What can we say, or do?

What would you say, for example, to the Prime Minister?

Mr. Wilfred Sutton: The first thing, I think, that I would have to look at is where we're located geographically. Newfoundland is not in the middle of the Atlantic ocean. We didn't come here because of the oil and gas, and we didn't come because of Voisey's Bay. We came here because of fish, and that's where we've survived.

I think Trepassey was first settled back in the 1600s--1610, I think, to be factual. We came here for fish, and granted, we evolved and worked our way up from motor boats to middle-distance vessels, to offshore trawlers and up to factory-freezer trawlers in some cases. But I think by the very nature of where we are and what we have historically depended on, it's only sensible to think that somewhere in the mix of it all, fish and the economy that fish generates have to be part of our future.

It's important, I think, to instruct and teach younger people that history. Without knowing their past, it doesn't really prepare them well for the future. I think recognizing where we came from, recognizing where we fell down at times, with regard to the management problems we've encountered over the years, it more or less hits home again, to me at least, with regard to what our mayor has said, what the Mayor of Burgeo said, what the people of Ramea and all the other communities along this coast have said. It's fish that's going to be in some way part of our future, if we're going to be able to survive here at all.

Maybe at some point in time we'll have to realize that we're not going to be able to survive here at all. I think we need to be looking after the resource as well as we can, and if there's overfishing going on--and this is what we hear all the time--I think, yes, Canada should be taking some type of unilateral action to see if they can control and manage it.

Mr. Peter Stoffer: This is my last question, sir.

My colleague Mr. Cuzner from Cape Breton mentioned aquaculture, and in St. Alban's here in Newfoundland, the Coast of Bays Corporation is pursuing that avenue very vigorously. Is the town of Trepassey working with Coast of Bays in terms of trying to develop an aquaculture policy for your community?

Mr. Tony Hewitt: Not at this time. Hopefully, we will over the next few months, with a company that is interested in coming to Trepassey and investing in aquaculture. We've met with them already, and they're planning on investing up to $5 million. Hopefully, from there we will be following through.

Mr. Peter Stoffer: Thank you.

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The Chair: Thank you very much, Mr. Hewitt and Mr. Stoffer.

Mr. Hearn, last question.

Mr. Loyola Hearn: Thank you, Mr. Chairman, and thanks to Tony and Wilf for coming in. I congratulate them on their well-put-together presentation. It covers a lot of issues.

Let me say to them that the committee is not unaware of Trepassey. We've heard a lot about it in recent days. Perhaps I should say as well that the Department of Foreign Affairs also knows about Trepassey.

You mentioned, Tony, how Trepassey over the last 35 to 40 years has depended so heavily on the fishery. That's true, but if you go back 50 years or whatever, Trepassey wasn't as big as 1,700 people, and neither, like most coastal communities, was it doing very well, because they were living off a meagre inshore operation. It was the deep-sea fleets, fishing on the very Grand Banks that we are talking about in our meeting, landing their fish in the newly built fishery products plant in Trepassey, that turned the whole area around.

Wilf worked, I guess, 50 weeks a year. Up to 600 people were working, and in the summer every youngster who could lift a fish worked at the plant. The town in the late seventies and eighties got practically everything a town would want, as you mentioned this morning. However, if we protect the resource that we talked about, if that deep-sea resource comes back, it will be fished by deep-sea boats. The nearest and best port for them to land is Trepassey. So there could be a future, but only if the resource is protected.

With the diversification fund...the very word itself. Trepassey, like other areas, was given money to do practically anything except put it into the fishery, and yet the only thing that could keep those communities alive was something in relation to the fishery. If they had been able to downsize, change a little bit, at least they would have been able to hold on to their licence. They haven't even got a licence now in Trepassey. So it's been a disaster.

The question I will ask is a double-barrelled one. Both will have a chance to answer.

Wilf is an outreach officer with HRDC, heavily involved in dealing with everybody who has had trouble in relation to the fishery. He was the one, when families wanted to go to Alberta, who had to sit and face them, who had to try to advise and help. That's not an easy thing to do. I'd certainly like him to give us a few examples of what he's seen, because this puts a human face on what we're doing.

When I saw Tony back in the late seventies, early eighties--I was a very young teacher--Trepassey was a booming town. It was flourishing. It could maintain its infrastructure. I'd like Tony to tell us what is happening to the infrastructure that we built up, and how the town can maintain it.

That's a two-pronged question.

Mr. Wilfred Sutton: First of all, if we didn't already say it, I guess we should say that we're very thankful for the support the government has been able to provide us over the last decade, and even before that. Without the NCARP and TAGS programs, the population of Trepassey would be a lot less a lot more quickly than the last census data showed.

Loyola is right when he speaks about the pain and suffering people went through. In some ways, there's even a certain amount of pain and suffering related to NCARP and TAGS, because we are a hard-working people. We're all hard-working people. The way of the sea is not an easy way of life, and to be sitting around, twiddling your thumbs, wondering what you're going to do, when you're spending your time on NCARP or TAGS, is not what a lot of people hope for or aspire to.

Indeed, for a lot of our people who worked at the plant, including a lot of the younger people, maybe in some ways what happened with the decline of the fishery is a blessing, because some of the younger people who left high school early to take up work in the plant then decided to go back to school. Some of them became professionals and went on to work in the health care sector and other areas of the economy that drives our country. They went on to a whole new way of life.

The people who are probably the most difficult to speak about, and the ones who come to mind when Loyola asks about examples, are the times when I have to sit down and look at a man and his wife and maybe only one of them on TAGS and the other unemployed and with two or three children and trying to get them ready for school in September and the cost of everything that goes with that.

TAGS at some point is going to end, and in every case people knew it was going to end. The really hard cases that come to mind are the times when it was coming to an end and people were deciding whether they were going to stay and try to make it on social services, or whether they were going to pick up the three or four children and the wife and start looking to an area they knew nothing about, like Brooks. At Lakeside Packers in Brooks, I think on any day of the week now you can walk down there and you'll probably bump into 40 or 50 from the southern shore and the Trepassey area in particular.

These types of decisions, like sitting around and talking to me, a former plant worker who worked with them, lots of times brought tears to all of us. It was never easy. It was never easy to see them going. In some cases some of the people went and had to come back, and in some cases they had to go again. But it doesn't happen overnight; it's a long process.

When we talk about the impact on health, those are the types of things we refer to in this report. I think there are impacts on people's health, on communities' health that have yet to be seen from some of the stuff that has happened in communities like Trepassey. There's a stress level and a depression level that probably doesn't get talked about. Because of the type of people we are, we're able to handle it to some degree and keep our heads up and keep a grin on our faces and keep going, but I'm pretty sure in my mind that the hurt and the hardship we've been through have impacted us greatly in terms of families and indeed individuals.

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The Chair: Thank you very much, Mr. Sutton.

Tony, we'll not hold it against you that Mr. Hearn taught you. Go ahead.

Mr. Tony Hewitt: I have just a few comments.

As mayor of Trepassey, it's a very difficult and hard time right now, as for any mayor in a rural community, but especially so for Trepassey.

Mr. Hearn asked about the infrastructure. If anything goes wrong now with our water lines or anything, it's a crisis for us. Luckily, this past month we got funding up to $40,000, thanks to our MP again, to do up our chlorination and our pump house and our water system.

Our main tax base is gone. Half our residents, half our population is gone. We still have to maintain our street lights, our water and our sewer, our pump houses, our lift stations, but how can we keep this up on the backs of the residents who are still remaining and fighting this day? We can't afford to increase our taxes any more. Every winter we're hoping for no snow, for the simple reason that we can't afford to pay for a snow-clearing budget.

Every week, every month we're constantly going around to see which street light can we take out. Can we take a street light out that's not going to hurt our residents so it would save us $20 on our bill when it comes in? It's those kinds of things.

The Chair: Mr. Hearn.

Mr. Loyola Hearn: One very brief comment, Mr. Chairman. This is St. Patrick's day weekend, and a big one in the area. One of the best books ever written about Irish history is Leon Uris' Trinity. There is one line that sticks with me, and I guess always will, and it relates to Trepassey and all these Newfoundland towns where we're losing our young people. They're in Boston and in New York and they march in the parades and they sing their Irish songs with tears in their eyes, but they never come home. That's the unfortunate thing about all this.

The Chair: Thank you, Loyola.

In your presentation, on point 12, page 5, you talk about the Canada Pension Plan disability benefits should have the restrictions removed that may prevent unemployed former fisheries workers from qualifying. What specifically is that problem?

Mr. Wilfred Sutton: I'll respond to that. It has been my experience, living in the community and working with some of the people who worked in the fishery and who stopped working in 1992 or 1991, that in 1995, 1996, and 1997, some of them got sick. When they went to see if they could qualify for Canada Pension disability and completed the application, because they hadn't been in the workforce for I think it was four of the last six years, or three of the last five years--something like that--they couldn't qualify even for consideration under the program. There's no way a person displaced in the fishery can have income in four of six years if the industry shuts down. I think that applies to all workers, not only former fishery workers. Any worker who's out of industry for a certain period of time may not qualify under that program.

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The Chair: Okay, I understand what you're talking about.

Mr. Matthews.

The Chair: Okay, a short point, Mr. Stoffer.

Mr. Peter Stoffer: At the beginning of their report they mentioned Dr. Tony Charles' GPI report about the wellness of coastal communities. Have you actually had a chance to read his report?

Mr. Wilfred Sutton: No, I haven't.

I did speak with the gentleman, briefly, and he referred me to the GPI website. I took some time to look over that, but I haven't read the full report, no.

Mr. Peter Stoffer: What I'll do then, Mr. Chairman--I have a copy and I mistakenly haven't yet brought a copy to Andrew--is give a copy of that report to this committee, and I'll give one to Loyola to send to you.

It's an excellent report about how we count fish and what it means to the economic viability of not just Atlantic Canada but all of Canada. Thanks for bringing it up.

The Chair: Thank you very much then, gentlemen, for your presentation, and thanks to Loyola for bringing you in.

The next witnesses will be replacing Mr. Felt, who couldn't make it, but from the same association: Ken McLean and Don Norman.

We'll take a five-minute break before we reconvene. I know people are starting to wear down.

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The Chair: Could we reconvene? The sooner we start, the sooner we'll be completed.

Could we come back to order? We don't want to meet without our Newfoundland and Labrador colleagues. It's not that they're talkative, they're deep in conversation.

For the ones who are here, we will take written submissions too from the ones who didn't get a chance to make a presentation.

Welcome to the Salmonid Association of Eastern Newfoundland, Ken McLean and Don Norman. The floor is yours. The normal procedure is to try to keep the presentation relatively short and then go to questions. Go ahead, whoever is leading off.

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Mr. Don Norman (Vice-President, Salmonid Association of Eastern Newfoundland): Thank you very much.

My name is Don Norman. I'm vice-president of SAEN, which is the Salmonid Association of Eastern Newfoundland. With me is Ken McLean. Ken is the chairman of our management committee. We'd certainly like to express our thanks for the opportunity to address the committee. We have circulated a copy of our presentation, with some small addendums.

The objectives of SAEN. SAEN emerged in 1979 as an association of individuals who were concerned about the status of the Atlantic salmon stocks in Newfoundland and Labrador. SAEN is a non-profit organization with a current membership of approximately 400. We're staffed entirely with volunteers. We're also an affiliate of the Atlantic Salmon Federation, which is, as most of you know, based in New Brunswick.

SAEN is governed by an elected board of 15 members. Generally, this board has a knowledge of fisheries management, both nationally and internationally, and skills and experience ranging from fisheries and biology to resource development economics.

The prime objective of SAEN is to further the conservation, protection, and stock enhancement of salmonids, which are basically trout and salmon, in the province; to educate the public about the social and economic importance of salmon; to promote an appreciation of recreational sports fishery; and to assist and support various federal and provincial agencies in their efforts to conserve, protect, and enhance salmon and trout.

Where are we now? Up until the 1970s the salmonid resource supported both a commercial and a world-class recreational fishery in the province. However, the decline in stocks since this period--and we've attached the chart--resulted in the closure of the commercial fishery in 1991 and reduced fishing opportunities for recreational sport fishers.

In spite of the closure of the commercial fishery, stocks have not improved as expected. This decline is of considerable concern, particularly since there are no scientific models to adequately describe the reason for this phenomenon.

Within Canada, in 1995 the recreational fishery was worth approximately $5 billion. Within Newfoundland, the value of the recreational fishery in 1991--that's the only study we could find--was approximately $100 million, with $20 million being the value of the salmon resource.

Where are we now? Knowledge of the reasons for the decline of salmonid resources is limited and needs to be addressed urgently.

Recreational trout fishing is the most popular form of fishing in Newfoundland and Labrador. Our knowledge of the trout resource, which includes lake trout, rainbow trout, brook trout, sea-run brook trout, brown trout, and sea-run brown trout, is particularly limited. There is insufficient data on which to base a comprehensive management plan for this resource. The experience of anglers suggests that this resource is also in decline in Newfoundland and under threat through the extension of the new coastal Labrador highway.

The management plan for trout is inadequate, given the particular tourist potential of the Labrador trout fishery. Having said that, the recent proposal to manage trout by region and species is long overdue but is only an initial step in improving management of this resource.

There are a number of potential reasons for the decline in salmon stocks. These include: increased at-sea predation from seals and sea birds; impact of aquaculture to genetic interference from escapees of wild salmon; increase in sea lice and diseases; the competition between escapees and wild salmon; poaching at sea and inland waters; by-catch from bait nets and trout nets or herring nets; possible changes in migration patterns of salmon; the impact of forestry operations on inland water habitat; pesticide spray; and hydro projects have obviously had some negative effects on us.

In particular, SAEN is concerned that continued poaching at sea and in inland waters is having a significant detrimental effect on salmon populations. Again, our greatest concern is the downward trend in smolt survival at sea. Despite highly variable survival from river to river, there has been no consistent improvement in smolt survival at sea since the closure of the commercial fishery. In most systems, smolt survival at sea has indeed increased, as indicated again in the attached chart that we have from DFO.

The decline in salmonid stocks is sufficient evidence that the current management plan for salmon and trout is not working. SAEN has addressed these issues in our response to the 2002-2006 management plan for Atlantic salmon. Again, we've attached our response.

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What is required? Redirection and an increase in research capacity. Resources must be allocated or increased to establish baseline data on the Atlantic salmon resource, and to establish the reason for the declining smolt survival at sea. If the reason for the declining smolt population at sea is not established and addressed, Atlantic salmon will suffer the same fate as cod.

For the improved management of the recreational fishery, there are a number of actions that can be taken immediately by those responsible for the management of the fishery that we feel would impact on smolt survival and the survival of grilse. They are the improved enforcement of regulations, particularly with respect to poaching in both fresh water and marine environments, more stringent controls for bait nets, and removal of nuisance predators in estuarial waters.

On community involvement, in the long term, emphasis must be placed on the education of future generations to ensure a strong appreciation for the resource. Also, local groups must be encouraged to be involved in the wise management of local watersheds.

If necessary, the issues could be addressed through the negotiation of a new federal-provincial cooperative agreement. This agreement could provide funds for research and management initiatives to address the declining stocks.

Significant funds have been allocated for research on Pacific salmon over the next few years. I think it is about $600 million. It is time for a similar initiative in Atlantic Canada. The bottom line is we have to get some money to do research or we're going to lose what we have.

This is pretty much our presentation. We're more than willing to discuss these items.

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The Chair: I think it's an interesting slide, the very first one. In terms of small salmon recruits, Newfoundland is the next one in.

Mr. Lunney.

Mr. James Lunney: Thank you. We're a little off the nose and tail here, I think.

Mr. Don Norman: We're not too sure sometimes.

Mr. James Lunney: Of course, salmon have very good noses and tails to help them find streams when they're working properly, I gather.

There are big issues on the west coast. Going back to a general comment, there are a lot of questions raised as to why the salmon have disappeared.

Again, the concern here is what has happened to our research and science budgets. I become concerned when we stop looking for answers. It makes me wonder if they found out. It's more convenient not to look any longer and let them disappear than it is to fix the problem sometimes.

In terms of our west coast experience, we did find our habitat was very severely damaged by logging experiences. There have been some very constructive efforts done on habitat improvement, stream keepers, and clearing out streams that were clogged.

With local communities anytime, it's the local people rather than DFO who found solutions. We saw it in Tofino where they have their own hatcheries. They have been quite effective in restocking streams that are coming back very nicely.

Again, what is your perspective?

Mr. Don Norman: I think one of the points we tried to make is, yes, there is some money spent on research. It is decreasing every year. The scientists have a major concern about it. We have tried to emphasize that much of the research they've done indicates there could be a number of problems. They rarely come up with recommendations.

If you wanted to look at the small charts, they are the ones that are of major concern. These figures are not perfectly correct. Put very simply, historically when smolt leave the fresh water and go to the ocean, you would probably get about 10% of them coming back. If there were 1,000 smolt left, you'd get 100 fish back. Recently, we're finding the percentages in some rivers are down to about 1.6%. It's somewhat variable.

The real problem we have is that the scientists indicate to do research outside the rivers is very expensive. They don't have the money. It's where the problem is. The money has to go out there.

In the last number of years we've been reducing the catch on the river. It's not going to solve it. If there were no fish caught on the river, we'd put many people out of jobs. It wouldn't help the fishery.

Someone has to go out and actually find what the problem is. They feel they can do it. There are all kinds of theories on it. They do need the money to do it and they don't have it.

Mr. James Lunney: You mentioned predators. We're back to our seal population again?

¹ (1545)

Mr. Don Norman: Again, we're talking right now about the smolt, because that's the big concern. Generally, when smolt leave the fresh water, they're approximately eight, nine, or ten inches long. Generally they go out to the mouth of the river and they're there for maybe a day or three or four days, that type of thing. Nobody really knows. At the mouths of our rivers now, we're lined off with seals. The seals are coming up the river where they've never been before.

To put it in perspective, if every seal on the Atlantic coastline ate one salmon a year, in one year there'd be no fish left. There are more seals. If one seal in ten ate a salmon, they'd wipe out the whole stock in one year. I can tell you stories about Renews River. We've caught sea trout at the mouth of the Renews River, and we've had seals actually take them off our hooks as we're trying to bring them in. This is right within the community, right on the beach.

A voice: That's competition.

Mr. Don Norman: Yes, that's competition.

Mr. Ken McLean (Chair, Fish Management Committee, Salmonid Association of Eastern Newfoundland): That was the last day of the fishing season. I wasn't too happy.

The Chair: On that point, Don, in your wildest dreams 10 years ago, would it ever happen that a seal would take it off your hook?

Mr. Don Norman: No. There weren't as many of them. The cod were still there, so I suspect they were probably.... The capelin fishery is down, the cod is down, everything is down. Even the cod themselves are eating salmon smolt. It's the same thing with the birds nowadays. They have to eat, and if they can go eat a good herring, that's what they'll do. If the herring and capelin are not there, they'll turn on what's available, and that's the smolt.

Again, our big concern--and we'll continuously go back to this point--is that if the smolt that are hitting the water today were returning in the same ratio as they were historically, as we know it, we wouldn't have a major problem. But these smolt are going out and something is happening to them. We cannot find out. They're not getting back. We've listed a bunch of theories that people have, but that's what they are.

We had a presentation last week from Dr. Dadswell from Dalhousie. He claims to have information that the smolt are going to Europe. In Europe there's a bunch of reflagged Danish boats that are taking them out of the water illegally, hand over fist. He can explain in great depth why he feels this. It has something to do with the amount of radiation in the water over there leaving some kind of mark on the fish. When they come back, he takes them to the laboratory and checks them. There are all kinds of theories, but the scientists are not out there checking, and they have to get out there and check.

The Chair: Science has not been done.

Mr. Roy.

[Translation]

Mr. Jean-Yves Roy: Thank you, Mr. Chair.

I am not sure if I am translating correctly but on page 1 of your document, you say that only 8 of the 15 rivers are currently checked by the Department of Fisheries and Oceans. I am looking at the rates where the populations are in decline; you give some examples: down 32 percent, down 70, down 64. Do you think it is the same thing in the other rivers here, in Newfoundland, where the salmon population is concerned?

The other factor I would like to bring up and which you spoke about, because the Committee is currently working on a report on aquaculture, is that of cultured salmon, which cause considerable harm to the natural river salmon.

Have you verified scientifically or have you any data which allow you to state that they do have a real impact, right now, on the native salmon? And in how many rivers in Newfoundland does this phenomenon occur? How many aquaculture sites are affecting the rivers?

[English]

Mr. Don Norman: First of all, according to DFO, the rivers that are noted are representative rivers. This should be an indication of a sort, although there's great variation no matter where you go.

With respect to aquaculture, when we indicated that farmed fish are a potential problem, in many areas--and I've read some articles on Norway in particular--the biggest problem they have is aquaculture, escaped fish. In Newfoundland we've seen signs that escaped fish are getting into our rivers. We know that. They're starting to spread around. But as of today, I don't think we could say there's anything to indicate that's part of our problem. It's a potential problem, but no, we don't feel that it's a major problem within the province.

¹ (1550)

The Chair: Thank you, Don.

Ken, any time you want to add anything....

Mr. Ken McLean: The other question with aquaculture is related to poaching. There's no way of distinguishing a poached fish from a farmed fish. The farmed fish used to be tagged, so that gave the fisheries officers at least the opportunity of being able to tell whether the fish they were dealing with was a wild fish or a poached fish.

If someone knocks on my door in late May or early June, as they do every year, offering to sell me fresh salmon, I've no way of knowing where that fish came from. But they always seem to knock sometime around the run of fish coming up the west coast rivers. It's purely coincidental, of course, but that simple device of putting tags back on farmed fish would go a long way towards being able to identify the differences.

In respect of the aquaculture, you also have to look at its effect on sea trout populations. We don't have a big aquaculture industry in this province, but certainly if you look at the effects of aquaculture on the west coast of Ireland, it decimated the sea trout population along the coast. There were 70,000 tourist bed nights lost in three years on the west coast of Ireland after the introduction of aquaculture farms in the estuaries, because of the proliferation of sea lice.

The sea trout live around the coastline. The proliferation of sea lice killed the fish. They didn't have a massive impact on salmon, because the salmon swim through, but the sea trout actually are resident. We can see possible impacts from aquaculture on sea trout populations in Atlantic Canada, but the aquaculture industry here isn't big enough to impact on that.

The Chair: Thank you, Ken.

Mr. Stoffer.

Mr. Peter Stoffer: Thank you, Mr. Chairman, and thank you, gentlemen, for your presentations.

Have you had any dealings with the country of St. Pierre and Miquelon at all in this regard?

Mr. Don Norman: Not really. At the last meeting I attended with DFO, they do have a fishery. We've been told there's an abundance of salmon available in St. Pierre, and in some of the documents, they have a small legal net fishery. How small it is, I don't know. How well regulated it is, I don't know, but certainly they're about the only group we know of in North American right now that can legally net salmon for food in salt water.

Mr. Peter Stoffer: Recently the federal government of the United States classified the salmon of Maine in various rivers an endangered species. You haven't put it here, though, but is it the recommendation of the Atlantic Salmon Federation or yourselves for the federal government to maybe think in that direction, of placing these wild Atlantic salmon, or the Newfoundland ones, if you want to be more specific, on the endangered species list?

Mr. Don Norman: There is a criterion in which they have all kinds of ratings, and we don't see anything right now that would indicate that it should be endangered in Newfoundland.

There are some rivers in which serious action has been taken, and I can briefly discuss one. I think the Bay of Fundy rivers are very close to being referred to as endangered.

Just to show you the type, we have one river out in Clarenville. The smolt return last year was 1.6%. In order to adequately support the river at its current level, it needs a 100% spawning requirement. That's the number of fish it has, and I think last year it was 15%. I could be a little bit wrong.

I did take note; it's 6%. It had 6% of the spawning requirement. That's all that's going back to that river.

You're not allowed to net salmon, and 23% of the fish going back to that river have net marks. Four years ago, in 1996, there were 800 fish; last year there were 152. The level of fish in that particular system is so low that there's a real concern about genetic diversity, and if you get down to too small a number of fish, you can't maintain genetics sufficient to maintain that.

But again, we have talked to scientists about what the problem is, and they do some things, but when you get a smolt return of 1.3%, which is what they think they have on that river, you would have to put out a massive number of smolts just to be able to survive--ten times as many really as should be required. There is a major concern.

¹ (1555)

The Chair: Last question, Peter.

Mr. Peter Stoffer: In the region of Labrador, do the Inuit people there have an aboriginal right to fish salmon?

Mr. Don Norman: Both the Innu and the Inuit and as a matter of fact even the local residents have some flexibility. They're allowed to net trout, and I think each of them are allowed to, in a bycatch, catch four fish per year.

The Chair: Thank you.

Mr. Wappel.

Mr. Tom Wappel: Thank you.

Mr. Chairman, gentlemen, I was watching the Discovery Channel recently, in particular The Crocodile Hunter--and I hope to be able to show you the relevance of this in a moment--and he was talking about the impact of the introduction of certain animal species into Australia by human beings. His point was that while certain species were introduced for apparently good reasons and with proper thinking, nature itself took over and the ultimate impact was anything but what was foreseen when people brought these animals into Australia. The wild rabbits.... The cane toad, for example, which was brought in to control a certain insect, is poisonous. All the animals bit it, since they'd never seen it or had any experience with it, and were poisoned themselves and died off. These are very rare animals in Australia.

What does this have to do with salmon? The point is, it seems to me, that there's such a huge ripple effect in nature that we can't see, because it does take time. It makes some sense to me that if you wipe out a particular species over a period of time, there are going to be dramatic natural repercussions to the loss of that particular ecosystem.

I'm thinking here of the cod, for example, because we've heard about the seals. You've mentioned in your presentation presumably pests that at one point weren't pests, and the reason they weren't pests is that they had something else to eat and weren't in your area bothering you; they weren't in the estuaries and rivers, according to your testimony.

Mr. Don Norman: Previously they were controlled too, by the way. Years ago, if a guide on a river saw a seal up the river, the seal didn't last very long, and I'm sure up in Loyola's territory a few years ago the seal would not last.

Mr. Tom Wappel: You also mentioned sea birds. As we know, there are hundreds of millions of sea birds all over the oceans, and they rise and fall in terms of population with the rise and fall of what they eat.

As far as the salmon are concerned, it seems to me that there has to be some correlation between the dramatic loss of other species--I presume different types of seals feed on different types of things, of course. If the seal herds are continuing to grow, it's clear that they're finding alternatives to what they were eating heretofore.

If there can be a correlation--it's a big “if” because you need the research dollars--to show that the predation is directly related to the fact that other species are no longer there, then it would perhaps be another argument for a cull. From what we have heard today, there seems to be a large number of seals compared to the number of seals that would be needed to sustain the herd, or whatever the terminology is. There's probably not the will there to do a study to prove that a cull is needed.

Mr. Don Norman: Some things are very obvious. We all know that when salmon come back to a river, they don't come from salt water and run up the river. For a period of time, they're acclimatizing within the estuary. When smolt come out, they do the same thing. In that particular area right now, you'll find not one or two seals; in Campbellton River, they talk about 12 seals straight out across the bay, just going in. It has a negative effect.

We know of places where we've caught.... There was a man arrested last year, as a matter of fact, when he picked a salmon up out of the causeway out in Gander. The reason he picked it up was that the salmon had no stomach left. The seal had come and just taken it. He reached down and picked it up and put it on the back of his truck. I don't know if he got fined or not, but he certainly got arrested.

As a first step--and I think we might have some approval for doing this; there's a new policy that's just started--certainly in those very sensitive points, if we had to control the seals, I've heard some very good bird experts indicate, with respect to the Bay of Fundy, that if your salmon resource in the Bay of Fundy is an endangered species, you may have to have an allowable negative effect on something else to make sure you do not wipe out the salmon in that particular region.

The other thing that's happened, obviously...and again, I fish Renews. If you wanted to go outside, they've got gannets out there. I don't know how many of them, but they're out there. With all due respect, they're not living on fried food. They have smolt and probably the best run of sea trout on the southern shore, and that's got to be what they're.... You can see it if you go to fish; you'll see the seals come in and swirl around. The fish are jumping up out of the water. Eventually, the seal will pop his head up with a nice big fish and a grin on his face and go on. If nothing else, in those particular areas, the effect of having seals and predators is so bad and having such a negative effect that we politely say they should be removed.

Now, if somebody wants to put...

The Chair: Sorry.

Ken, go ahead.

º (1600)

Mr. Ken McLean: Your point about the introduction of exotic species is correct. You're talking to an Australian citizen, right? Your point is well made.

What we're asking, because of that point, is the application of the precautionary principle to Atlantic salmon and the salmonid stocks of this province. Otherwise, we will be coming back to this committee in five years asking for it to be put on the endangered species list. If you don't act now, with the five-year cycle from salmon birth to return to the river, and in the last three years there has been a decline--three out of five--then you will very rapidly approach the point where, on a large number of rivers in the province, salmon are not returning and will be endangered.

Of the representative rivers that DFO monitor, 60% already are below conservation requirements. If those rivers are representative, you can therefore say, of the 185 scheduled rivers in the province 60% are now already below conservation requirements--if you accept that representative principle.

Mr. Peter Stoffer: Why wouldn't they want to put them on the endangered list, then?

Mr. Don Norman: There is a set of criteria. I can't remember what it is, but one is “in hazard”, and to get to the endangered level, we're not...except for the Bay of Fundy rivers.

Mr. Peter Stoffer: But you just said 60% of rivers are below conservation levels. To me that represents a species that should be endangered. I mean, I know we're mixing words here, but why wouldn't you want to go for the full bit and get the weight of the federal government behind you?

Mr. Don Norman: Once we represent them with some scientific...we can establish there are smolt returns. If we establish the smolt returns, then we don't have a problem. That is the significant issue.

The Chair: I'm going to come back to Mr. Cuzner.

Mr. Rodger Cuzner: I was glad for the clarification on the nuisance predators, because I thought that may have been the poachers.

Mr. Don Norman: We have a few, and they're very capable.

Mr. Rodger Cuzner: I think one thing this committee really does--and I guess decisions are driven by science--in my experience with them, is give the presenters, the guys who work in the field, whether it's the fishery or processing or whatever it might be, a great deal of respect and credibility for their testimony. It's the salmon associations that are on the rivers and on the riverbanks. They know what's going on with the system. I guess if we look at science to provide statistics, and we use statistics the same way a drunk uses a lamppost--more for support than illumination--then the researchers would support what you guys already feel.

What I'm asking you is if we look at some general categories: poaching, habitat, the condition of the habitat, the impact that aquaculture has on the smolt, and what have you; and then the predators, the seals.... I know we see it in my community, the seals are at the mouths of the rivers and it's just like the buffet table at noon time with the seals.

So we look at those four general categories. Let's rank them. Which ones do you believe are having the most decimating effect on the stock?

º (1605)

Mr. Don Norman: We don't think there's any doubt that we have to find out what is happening at sea and that's one thing we are not doing. We have to find out why we're only getting 1%, 2%, 3% of these smolt back. If we don't find out what that problem is, I don't think anything else is going to work. We can close down the industry, take fishermen off the river, and do all of those things; it is not going to have very much of a positive effect.

That's what we've been doing. The latest salmon management plans have simply been doing that. We've been taking less and less fish out of the river, and if that was the solution, it's quite acceptable. But as we're taking less and less fish out of the river, this ratio is still down there, 1%, 2%, 3%, 4%. It is not going to get better.

In the short term, yes, we have to hit the poaching or else you're not going to have a resource that's strong enough to get the smolt out there to even do a survey on it. And those things are extremely manageable; we know what the story is on poaching.

The Chair: Mr. McLean.

Mr. Ken McLean: You want to be very careful, because when we put out the broad figures on the decline of the population overall, that in many instances may mask specific local effects. You may find that around the province there are hotbeds of poaching and in some areas there are inadequate forestry practices that impact on rivers. So you do have to get down to a level of discrete river management and specific actions across the board so that you don't avoid the local impacts and you don't also destroy rivers with small runs of salmon historically that meet this spawning requirement.

If this committee wishes to put poachers in the same classification as nuisance seals and deal with them in the same way, we'd be delighted.

The Chair: Mr. Hearn.

Mr. Loyola Hearn: Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

If I could make an aside, when Mr. Norman came in and we were talking to Wilf Sutton, we found that Mr. Norman's mother grew up next door to Wilf and they hadn't seen each other for years. So it's a small world.

Anyway, having said that, I certainly welcome the gentlemen here. SAEN is an organization that back in a previous life I worked with pretty closely out in the Rocky River, Colinet area in particular. It was a success story for quite a while, and I guess still is to some degree.

However, there is the issue of seals. Apparently last year you could almost walk Salmonier Arm on seals, and you had the Salmonier River, Rocky River, all those in that vicinity.

I circulated a document just a few minutes ago. Mr. Chairman, you saw it, I believe. Renews River was always a fairly good salmon river. In fact when we were kids, we'd stand by the roadside or get up on the fence, in the evening was the way to do it, and count the number of salmon that jumped in the harbour. In the spring the harbour would be just filled with salmon. You don't see any jumping any more, because there are few there.

To protect the few that are around and some of the trout, a local fellow last year built a little wooden platform on which he installed a rocking chair with a dummy fisherman. It looked really realistic, to the point where tourists stopped on the side of the road one day and were yelling out, “Sir, can you tell me where...?” What it was useful for was to frighten off the cormorants in particular and the gannets that will come around and dive for the fish.

It worked for them, but it didn't work for the seals. And lo and behold, a seal took up residence on the platform. He had it knocked. He'd feed until he got sick and then he'd climb up and sun himself on the platform.

And that's right in front of my house, by the way. I live right on the river. So that gives you an idea of the effect of seals on all stocks. It is probably the biggest problem we have.

I have just one question to the gentlemen. Out of the many options you list for dealing with the potential problem, if you had to take one, if this committee could go back to Ottawa and actually implement one resolution to the problem of declining salmon stocks, what would you want us to pursue?

º (1610)

Mr. Don Norman: Science has to find out and tell us what the problem is at sea. I think seals are certainly a short-term fix. They're having a very negative effect. Are they the total problem? We honestly don't know. Science doesn't know. Somebody has to spend the money to find out what is happening out there, and it's out there somewhere. It might be 50 feet outside the river, or 500 feet, or 300 miles.

Mr. Loyola Hearn: That's the scientific information.

Mr. Don Norman: We don't have the information. We honestly don't have it, and until you get that we can only guess. Now, there's no doubt, by the way, that seals are having an extremely negative effect on trout and salmon and other things. They're 15 and 20 miles up the river. Having said that, is that the real problem why the smolts are not coming back at a reasonable percentage? We don't know. We really don't know, and somebody has to find out, by hook or by crook, because if you don't, if you don't know what the problem is, you can't really solve it, and if we don't solve it, there's no doubt that.... There's a tremendous potential in rural Newfoundland to make money from trout and salmon, and we're not doing it, but we're going to get smarter and we're going to do it.

But the resource has to be looked after. Seriously, we don't know what the problem is. Science doesn't know what the problem is. They have to find out. And if it's seals, well, that's kind of an easy fix. If it's the fact that the fish migration routes are changed and they're going over to Europe and being abused over there, it might not be so easy to fix. But until we actually know what the problem is, it's everybody's best guess.

Last year DFO removed 190 illegally set nets in the salt water. Well, if you assume they got 10% of the nets, that means there are 2,000 nets. If you assume the 2,000 nets got 25 fish a season, it's 50,000 fish. We only angled 30,000 last year.

Those are all broad assumptions with very little scientific basis to them, but the resource is at the point now where somebody has to come up with some answers. Ken's point is well taken. There's a five- or six-year cycle. That's how long it takes. The eggs that were laid this year...it's going to be five years really before we get salmon back from those, and if we don't do something between now and then, we're in serious trouble.

In spite of this, we still have some of the cleanest water. Our habitat is clean. The only real environmental concern we have is clear-cutting and the negative effect that can have on our rivers. We've probably got the last, large true run of wild fish. We don't have hatchery fish. We tried to and we couldn't get the money. The end result is we have the best run of wild fish in the world right now, at least certainly in North America, and we should be pleased with it. Over time we have to learn to utilize it a bit better than we have.

But in the short term, we have an obligation to ensure that future generations.... We don't own that resource. We've got to manage it for a period of time and make sure that your youngsters and their youngsters have the same opportunity. It takes money and it takes emphasis.

The Chair: We do have to move on, gentlemen. Thank you very much for your presentation and for summing up the key point on science. I think you are probably aware that we did a seal report a few years ago, and we're constantly updating that.

Mr. Don Norman: If I may make one more comment, and we did make brief note of it, the last underutilized resource, I suspect probably in the world, is in Newfoundland and Labrador. You can go up there tomorrow and get four- and five- and six-pound brook trout. The salmon resource is underutilized. The reason it's been underutilized is that people couldn't get there.

We're now in the process of putting a road through Labrador. The various governing groups are going to have to make sure that the proper regulations are put in to ensure that we don't lose it. You will not get a second chance at it. It probably takes the five-pound trout ten or fifteen years to get that big. Catch and release will help, but that's not in effect right now. Somebody is going to have to go in and make sure that in ten years' time you look back at that road and...it's something like fishing along the Trans-Canada of Newfoundland now; there are no trout left. The people who are going to have to do it are going to have to be the governing authorities. They have the responsibility for it.

The Chair: Thank you very much, gentlemen. We appreciate your effort in coming here and putting the presentation together.

The next witness is from the Fogo Island Co-op, Bernadette Dwyer.

Ms. Dwyer, you have a fairly extensive presentation there, I believe. The procedure we normally follow, as you're probably aware, is to quickly go through the presentation and turn to questions. Welcome, and thank you for coming.

º (1615)

Ms. Bernadette Dwyer (Chief Executive Officer, Fogo Island Co-Operative Society): Thank you very much for giving me the opportunity to make this presentation on such short notice. I have circulated the brief for you and I will go through it as quickly as possible so we can have more time for questions.

First, I'd like to take the opportunity to give you a brief description of Fogo Island, our organization and our long-time involvement in the Atlantic fishing industry. Fogo Island is a small island that's located off the northeast coast of Newfoundland, and in your document I have enclosed some maps that will give you some idea of where we're located. It is connected to the mainland of Newfoundland by a ferry service, it has a population of approximately 3,400 people, and its economic base is the fishery.

In 1967, the Fogo Island Co-op was formed in response to the failing salt fish industry and the resettlement program introduced by the provincial government of the day. Residents of Fogo Island decided to form their own business and build a fleet of larger vessels that were capable of going further out to sea and fish a variety of fish species in order to diversify their economy and bring sustainability to their island community.

Today, the Fogo Island Co-op has three fish processing operations, one buying station, a marine service centre, stock room and a product development research facility. It processes and markets a variety of fish species in several countries around the world and has sales in the vicinity of $20 million annually. It is owned and operated by fishers and plant workers who invest 5% of their net income into their cooperative annually. At present its members have invested in excess of $3.8 million.

A volunteer board of directors is elected at the AGM of the society, whose duties are to set policy for the co-op and oversee its operation. The board hires a general manager who is responsible for the day-to-day operation of the business, and fishers who are members of the co-op also own and maintain their own independent enterprises outside the co-op structure.

The co-op has provided stability and sustainability to its island community for the past 35 years and has been actively involved in supporting the community through other initiatives. We have a long-term commitment to the sustainable use of ocean resources because we feel this is the only thing that will guarantee the long-term stability of our island community.

We want to bring to this discussion today the community perspective, and attempt to highlight the net economic, cultural, and social benefits obtained from allocating common resources to community-based businesses, businesses that operate for the betterment of the community as a whole. I have included here some statistics to give you an idea of the type of operation we are in. We are very diversified into shrimp, crab, groundfish, pelagic species, as well as community economic development.

As for our industry affiliations, we are a member of the Northern Coalition, which is an organization of aboriginal and regional-based groups located in remote northern communities who hold northern shrimp licences or allocations and whose mandate is community economic development. We are members of the Association of Newfoundland and Labrador Fishery Co-operatives, and this association is made up of the three fishery co-ops in the province: Fogo Island, Petty Harbour, and Torngat.

We are not members of the main industry organization of Newfoundland and Labrador, which is Salmonid, and which has presented to you earlier, I believe, in these briefs.

We are a shareholder of Newfound Resources, a company formed by fish companies and cooperatives that originally participated in the province's resource short plant program. Our company owns and operates the Fame and harvests our own offshore shrimp allocation.

This year, the Fogo Island Co-op will celebrate its 35th anniversary, which is something we are very proud of. As a community organization, a fish processing business, and individual fishing enterprises, we attribute our success to diversification.

In 1967, when we formed, we built a fleet of longliners to help us diversify to fish species other than cod. In 1979, we expanded from the salt fish industry into fresh frozen production, again to diversify both harvesting and processing. In 1983, we expanded into crab. In 1993, with our crab products, we expanded into Japan in raw products in order to obtain a better financial return and maintain our existing skilled workforce in the face of the groundfish moratorium. In 1988 we expanded into the inshore shrimp fishery with our fisher operations, and in 2000 we expanded into a shrimp processing plant, which was a joint venture with an Icelandic firm.

Our ability to continue to diversify our business has meant we have been able to operate a successful fish processing operation for 34 years, which in turn has sustained our community. This diversity has also provided stability and sustainability to our fisher members, from the smallest to the largest vessels.

Our larger vessels are guaranteed sale of their shrimp as well as their crab, turbot, and other groundfish at fair market prices, while maintaining their independence. Our smaller vessels, which are fairly restricted by their level of access to resources, can sell all species they are permitted to catch. Although several of these species we buy may only be in small volumes, and overall return to our business is small, it is significant to these small fishing enterprises.

An example is shown here that over $300,000 in additional revenue was given to these small inshore fishers just by our buying these small species, which is basically just a service to the fishermen. Many processors view these fisheries as nuisance fisheries. The volumes are too low and the costs to collect and process are too high. As a result, many inshore fishers cannot even sell these species.

This is just to highlight to you the type of organization we are. We are community based, and we're there to try to take advantage of every opportunity to help all the participants in this fishery obtain a good living from it.

While we are proud of our achievements to date, we continue to explore opportunities to diversify. Over the past two years we have been working with a partner to develop markets and commence production of sea cucumber, which is an underutilized species. This production will commence this spring and will create anywhere from 30 to 60 full-time seasonal jobs, as well as provide significant income to our inshore fishers.

In 2001, we commenced research into value-added and secondary processing opportunities for some of our primary products. This past week, we displayed some prototypes to potential customers at the Boston Seafood Show and look forward to developing them into commercial production. We anticipate at least 50 to 60 new full-time extended seasonal jobs to be created, and a better financial return to our cooperative. This will allow us to continue to carry out research and develop suitable markets.

The Fogo Island Co-operative is considered to be a small to medium-size fish processing operation in the Newfoundland fishing industry, and we have a reputation for producing high-quality seafood products. We have won the Newfoundland and Labrador Export Award on two occasions--in 1988 and 2000--and have been nominated this year for the Canada Export Award.

We have found that opportunities for a business like ours exist not only in the traditional markets but also in niche markets looking for not necessarily large volumes of products but specialty products with high quality and consistency.

We are presently undertaking an initiative to develop good marketing and promotional materials to allow us to go out to identify and explore some of these markets, such as in China and Japan, in order to further expand our processing capability, so we can provide higher levels of employment and increased revenue to our fishers.

On our issues of concern, access to an offshore shrimp allocation has helped us continue to carry out the types of activities outlined, in order to remain sustainable in the face of an ever-changing global economy and volatile fishing industry. Ours is a community-based business that is directly adjacent to this resource. We feel that the temporary nature of allocation should be changed to a permanent quota, which would enable us to more aggressively explore new market opportunities and allow us to continue to diversify our economy.

º (1620)

The present allocation we have of 1,000 tonnes provides the co-op a financial return of approximately $400,000 a year. I just want to point out that in our own organization, our members contribute $425,000 a year in share capital every year. We view this arrangement as a partnership, with both parties investing in the exploration of new opportunities to obtain the maximum benefit from a common resource.

With regard to extended jurisdiction on the nose and tail of the Grand Banks, we cannot overstress the importance of the Government of Canada, and specifically the external affairs department, becoming engaged in this issue. Overfishing on the nose and tail of the Grand Banks prevents the proper management of this fishery resource and places in jeopardy the long-term sustainability.

As I am sure all members of this committee are aware, the Government of Newfoundland and Labrador and the fishing industry became very engaged in this issue in the late eighties and early nineties. I personally participated in many of the presentations that were made, both in Europe and at the UN at the high seas fisheries conferences.

So I think a lot of effort was put into creating awareness of this issue among the general public, but to no avail. We did not engage the Government of Canada sufficiently to be able to address this issue. As a country, I think we were very diplomatic, to say the least, in addressing this issue on the international scene.

We feel that awareness on this issue has already been created, and we should not waste time on a similar type of campaign. Rather, we should engage the external affairs department to seek solutions, through mechanisms available to them, that will bear effective results--for example, international trade, etc. I don't think, and our organization doesn't think, we should waste another couple of years on campaigns just creating awareness. It's time for action.

We have several concerns about the declining coast guard services off the coast of Newfoundland--emergency response, vessels at sea, and emergencies on land. We are an island, and there are instances when the normal ambulance services cannot respond when the coast guard can. It is essential for us to continue to have access to this service. Our vessels fish out to 200 miles and in all types of conditions. It is essential to maintain adequate and timely emergency response services.

With regard to ice-breaking services, again, we are an island serviced by a ferry system. It is absolutely necessary for us to have access to the icebreaker service of the coast guard.

There are other issues, including vessel insurance. The increase in vessel insurance has become totally prohibitive and is placing a severe financial burden on fishing enterprises. We ask the Government of Canada to work with the fishing industry to encourage the insurance community to explore new, innovative ways to insure our fishing fleets.

Over the past number of years, the licensing, monitoring, and observer fees have continuously increased, and we are unsure of the benefits obtained from these types of procedures. There are alternatives, and again, we wish the Government of Canada would explore these alternatives so that we get better results from the money being invested in this type of service.

I will conclude there and give you the opportunity to ask any questions you may have about my presentation.

º (1625)

The Chair: Thank you very much, Madam Dwyer. A lot of work went into that presentation, obviously. As well, just from looking at the map, you certainly had a long drive getting in here. And it's great to see an island smaller than P.E.I., because I get ribbed on that a lot around here.

Mr. Burton.

Mr. Andy Burton: Just a quick comment, and I think my colleague has a short question, Mr. Chairman.

I just want to congratulate you on your presentation--very professional, very well done. It's nice to see a small island, a small community like yours, pull together and be very proactive, I think, and progressive. It looks like you're on the right track, and things seem to be going along. I think that's very indicative of what can be done with some innovation and some thought and some progressive approaches. I have some good friends from Fogo Island, actually. I'll talk to you about that after.

I just want to say I'm very impressed. Maybe there's a bit of a message here for others too, to become innovative and look for solutions. It's nice to hear something positive today. With all due respect, we have heard a lot about some very difficult situations, and I know they are there. So it's refreshing, and I congratulate you.

º (1630)

Ms. Bernadette Dwyer: Thank you very much. We attribute that to the commitment to the community and the community organization that we are. You have to look at the whole picture and how everything fits together, and not just focus in on either one species or one process. You have to bring everything together so that, as a package, it is sustainable. That's the type of message we're trying to send as a community.

The Chair: Mr. Lunney.

Mr. James Lunney: I have a quick question about the nose and tail, but before that, regarding your problem with the ice-breaking service, how far is your ferry service from Newfoundland?

Ms. Bernadette Dwyer: We are separated from the mainland by 15 kilometres.

Mr. James Lunney: Are there many times your ferry service doesn't run because of ice?

Ms. Bernadette Dwyer: As a matter of fact, I couldn't get here until today because the ferry service was not capable of running yesterday because of ice conditions and wind. The icebreaker is there at present, aiding the ferry. She cuts the channel through, and then the ferry can run through.

If there's not sufficient ice-breaking service in the area, if there's an emergency, the icebreaker is called away. Of course we don't expect that there's always going to be an icebreaker sitting on our doorstep, but as the resources are reduced, island communities like ours are going to be more severely affected. There are going to be longer periods of time when we're not going to be able to have access to the mainland.

What people have to realize is that the water channel is our highway. It's a very serious concern, not only for day-to-day operations but also for health and emergency services.

Mr. James Lunney: On that subject, before I move on, does that problem of being vulnerable to freeze-up cover a matter of weeks? Does it cover the whole winter season?

Ms. Bernadette Dwyer: We're vulnerable usually from mid-February until mid-May or the end of May. It's not just the normal freeze-over; it's the Arctic ice that moves down.

Mr. James Lunney: Okay, thank you.

Moving on, I noticed that under your requests here are issues that concern extended jurisdiction over the nose and tail. Are you advocating that Canada assume responsibility for that in a jurisdictional sense and extend the economic activity zone, or are you talking about a custodial management arrangement?

Ms. Bernadette Dwyer: In the ideal world, I guess we would request that we have unilateral control, but really custodial management is what we're talking about, for the sake of the sustainability of the resources that exist out there. They are in jeopardy. They were in jeopardy in the late 1980s and early 1990s, when we had a large campaign launch to try to address this issue.

I participated as well, as a non-governmental organization, and interacted with non-governmental organizations from around the world. They are people the same as we are. They have communities and they have job losses and all those types of things. So that's not the way you're going to find solutions to this. It has to be at a higher level. It has to be in a forum whereby there are pressures brought to bear. It has to be on the basis of sustainability of those resources, not just for Canadians but for the rest of the world.

Mr. James Lunney: Thank you.

The Chair: Thank you, Mr. Lunney.

Monsieur Roy.

[Translation]

Mr. Jean-Yves Roy: Thank you, Mr. Chair.

It's a very simple question. You mentioned, on the last page of your report, that there was a significant increase in insurance premiums for boats. When you say a significant increase, I would like to know what this means for a boat. How many boats do you work with? I think we have it here, at the beginning, but how much money would the increase in the insurance premium represent annually compared to what it cost you four years, five years ago?

[English]

Ms. Bernadette Dwyer: I can't give you a figure on the dollar value of the increase. What has increased the most that's having the largest impact on the fishers is the deductible. One of the biggest impacts is on fishers who participate in the seal fishery. The deductible, for instance, has been increased to $250,000. So as you can see, if you own a vessel that's worth a half a million dollars and your deductible is $250,000, then really you are prevented from participating in that fishery.

So these are the types of numbers we're talking about.

There are other solutions. This is what we're asking the Government of Canada to engage in--a process whereby we explore other alternatives. Is there a way we can insure vessels in a group, for instance, or in some kind of pool? Instead of it being a $250,000 deductible, there is a pool that reduces it, so if there's 10% damage, it's shared.

There are other models and other solutions that can be found. We just want the Government of Canada to intercede to bring some kind of process in place so that it encourages both the insurance companies and the fishing industry to sit down and find solutions to this.

Mr. Jean-Yves Roy: Merci.

º (1635)

The Chair: Mr. Matthews.

Mr. Bill Matthews: Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman.

First of all, I'd like to thank you for coming and for such a good presentation and a very positive story. As Mr. Burton has said, it's nice to see a positive story. We've heard so much doom and gloom in the last two days, and for good reason.

You talked about the ice. What's the impact of the ice situation on getting your product to market? Does it impact your shipping out and delays in meeting your market requirements in any way?

Ms. Bernadette Dwyer: No, because our normal fishery is carried out in the six and seven months from April until December, when we usually don't run into serious problems. For instance, it's late April before we get into shrimp and crab production, so it's probably going to be June before we get to market. So it doesn't usually create....

It does play havoc with our company, our management, meetings, and all those types of things, but not with our product, no.

Mr. Bill Matthews: The main product you process is shrimp and crab?

Ms. Bernadette Dwyer: Yes.

Mr. Bill Matthews: Did you say you're into a joint venture with an Icelandic company?

Ms. Bernadette Dwyer: Yes. The plant was opened in 2000. At that time we entered into a joint venture with an Icelandic firm.

Mr. Bill Matthews: Is that on shrimp?

Ms. Bernadette Dwyer: Yes, that is just the shrimp plant.

Mr. Bill Matthews: So how much shrimp are you processing there?

Ms. Bernadette Dwyer: We processed three million in the last two years, the reason for that being that it took us two years basically to get that operation up and running at a sufficient level, a productivity level, because the equipment was brought over from Iceland and of course had to be installed in our plant. Everything was different, the power sources, everything. So it took us two years basically to iron out all the bugs. We anticipate this year that we should be producing around seven million.

Mr. Bill Matthews: So you didn't begin your shrimp production before you got the allocation, the same year as the infamous P.E.I. allocation, I guess. Is that when you started shrimp?

Ms. Bernadette Dwyer: This plant was in operation that same year, but the operation was put in place before that allocation was given to us.

Mr. Bill Matthews: So what did you get, then? Did you get 1,000 or 500 tonnes?

Ms. Bernadette Dwyer: One thousand tonnes, yes.

Mr. Bill Matthews: In addition to that, it seems that you are processing more than that. Where would the other shrimp come from?

Ms. Bernadette Dwyer: We are not processing that 1,000 tonnes. That is offshore allocation, which is caught offshore.

Mr. Bill Matthews: So you get money for that.

Ms. Bernadette Dwyer: Yes. That's caught by Newfound Resources, in which we are shareholders.

The shrimp we process is landed by our own fishers, our inshore fishers who fish that shrimp. The financial resources we get from that offshore allocation allow us to do the things we're doing as far as trying to expand markets, get into new products, all these types of things.

Mr. Bill Matthews: So that shrimp, for the information of members of the committee, is not creating any jobs in Newfoundland and Labrador. What it's doing is giving you a cashflow of such revenues that you then use for other things. Is that it?

Ms. Bernadette Dwyer: No, it's not giving us a cashflow in our normal operations.

Mr. Bill Matthews: So what's it doing?

Ms. Bernadette Dwyer: It's giving us the ability to be able to invest in exploring new markets, value-added secondary processing research into partnering with a Chinese firm into sea cucumber production--all of those types of activities we're doing to try to expand the employment opportunities and the revenues to our inshore fishers. That's what we're doing.

This money is being used for economic development. I guess that's the point we're trying to make here with common resources. Communities have the ability to be able to create sustainable economic opportunities in their communities. If common resources are going to be allocated, then we should look at what those communities can do with those resources once given to them.

Mr. Bill Matthews: I agree, and I totally support that. My line of questioning is really for information so that people understand what's really happening here. I commend you for it, and I support it. I support more of it.

It's an interesting story, how it enables you to do what you're doing here, because it's added to your success. It's a resource that we have so very much of.

I just want to congratulate you on what I think is a tremendous success story. I guess that's all I really want to say about this. It's a great story, if only you could get rid of the ice now.

Ms. Bernadette Dwyer: Thank you very much.

Just as a point of clarification, with the shrimp fishery, because there has been a lot of controversy over this I guess over the years, the offshore shrimp fishery, of course, takes place up north, a large distance off. Bringing that shrimp to shore is not an option, for it to be processed in plants onshore, especially not the main portion. For the industrial shrimp, yes, there is a possibility. But because of the quality and the need to process on a timely basis, you would not get the type of return that you now get by that fishery being processed offshore.

The only way communities can really benefit from that is for it to be caught offshore and the revenues to be brought onshore to be reinvested, to create employment, either within or outside the fishing industry.

Mr. Bill Matthews: One final thing. In your presentation you probably alluded to it and I missed it. At peak in your operation, what would be your peak employment numbers? You probably already said that, but I didn't catch it.

Ms. Bernadette Dwyer: Around 400.

Mr. Bill Matthews: Thank you.

The Chair: Thank you, Madam Dwyer and Mr. Matthews.

I can assure you, though, Bill, that the research being done on Fogo Island with the shrimp...similar research is being done on P.E.I. Some of it's targeted in the lobster industry. So some of that could benefit you.

Mr. Bill Matthews: Well, Mr. Chairman, I don't know if we should go there now.

The Chair: It was a wise decision at the time.

I wanted to come back to your statement on extended jurisdiction. Your last line said: “The political will was not there to address this issue on a national level, especially with External Affairs. Canada was very diplomatic in our approach.” I wonder if you could expand on that. I think you're being diplomatic in your very diplomatic language here. I even saw Loyola Hearn lose his temper at DFAIT the other night, which is extremely unusual for such a calm fellow.

We've heard a lot of fairly strong language about the will, I guess, of External Affairs to deal aggressively with these kinds of issues. You've been there. You've seen them operate to a certain extent. What's your take on it?

Ms. Bernadette Dwyer: My personal experience has been on the international scene, and again, my exposure has been very limited. I don't mean to leave the impression that I have been a major part of the type of campaign that was launched, but I did have the opportunity to be in Europe and to meet with some of the European Community at one of the Canadian embassies. We were left with the impression that you do not come on too strong, that you are diplomatic in your efforts here.

º (1640)

Granted, it was back in the early 1990s, but you have to realize that at that point in time we were facing a major crisis. If there was ever a time for raising public awareness and having the ammunition to back up your campaign, we had it then. We were being very diplomatic in how we approached it on the international scene.

º (1645)

The Chair: Okay, thank you.

Mr. Stoffer.

Mr. Peter Stoffer: Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman.

Your presentation reminds me of the woman we met from Winnipeg who was a fish buyer. I forget her name.

We've never had a female Minister of Fisheries and Oceans. Bernadette, if you ever decide to run for politics, we'll see that we get one.

Her presentation was one of the most positive I've ever seen anywhere. It was very well done. I know Hughie Stcroix is always positive about it. I want to congratulate her on the presentation.

You said you're not a member of FANL. Why not?

Ms. Bernadette Dwyer: We are a community organization that is made up of fishers and plant workers whose mandate is for the sustainability of our community. It is very broad. It makes us encompass the whole picture on harvesting processing, marketing, and the community. Our mold doesn't always fit the mandates of industry organizations, FANL being one. Their objectives are not always necessarily ours.

I don't want to leave you with a negative opinion. We are a very professional organization. We are a very successful business. We operate our businesses on a business level, the same as everyone else. The bottom line is not everything to our organization.

We have other objectives we have to meet. It separates us. It's like we're a strange animal that doesn't really fit into the mold. We've been part of FANL. We've moved out because not always do we have the same objectives. It's the reason we are not a member at this point in time.

We are members of an organization--for instance, the Northern Coalition--that we think is a like-minded organization. They represent northern communities who have large impediments when it comes to economic development because of distance, ice conditions, access, and all those types of things. They have to be community based and working for their community. Therefore, we feel more comfortable being aligned with an organization like that. The fishery co-op associations are aligned because we're like-minded organizations. It's the animal we are.

Mr. Peter Stoffer: This morning a gentleman from FPI and the member representing FANL said, in terms of what we do with the nose and tail of Grand Banks, we should take about a two- to three-year process before Canada does anything in a major regard. They talked about the September issue, but in two or three years. Other presenters representing communities said, no, we have to do something now. You've indicated quite clearly that the discussions about the nose and tail have been going on for well over 20 years.

If you were the Minister of Fisheries and Oceans and were going to deal with this issue, how much time would you give it?

Ms. Bernadette Dwyer: I would give whatever time was required. The way I would address it would be within the Government of Canada, within the departments that have the ability to address this issue, to bring pressure to bear on the international community to find results. International campaigns and public campaigns I don't think are going to produce this. We've done it. We've been there.

The Government of Newfoundland and Labrador, at the time, devoted all its attention to this issue. There was a major campaign that took place not only within the government, but within the non-governmental organization movement and, at the same time, with the high-seas fishery conferences that had a high profile. We didn't get the results we were looking for in that arena.

The Government of Canada has to, through the mechanisms of international trade and external affairs.... It's where we have to come up with the answers. The Government of Canada has to be engaged in this issue, know the seriousness of it, and know what impact it will have on not only on our provincial economy, but on Canada and the international scene.

The Chair: I don't think there's any question about it. Unless you have the full weight of the government as a whole, you're not going far on this issue.

º (1650)

Mr. Peter Stoffer: The reason I asked the question is that we're going to make a recommendation. We've heard some very professional people say a two-year to three-year process, and you've heard other people say right now.

When do we fish or cut bait, in your opinion? Eventually we're going to make recommendations saying the government should do this, and if by this particular date this has not happened, then either take unilateral action to extend the jurisdiction and take our lumps where they fall, or whatever. If you were writing the report to the minister, how would you word that type of recommendation so that it has some teeth in it, to have effective action, to tell the people of Newfoundland and Labrador that we've heard your concerns and we move this report forward, that this is it?

Ms. Bernadette Dwyer: I would write it in a framework whereby first I would state the seriousness of this issue, again from the sustainability of those resources that are out there, and I would state clearly the process and the effort that was put into the process that took place in the late 1980s, early 1990s, in the midst of crisis, and how we were not successful, and that now the Government of Canada needs to engage in this issue. They need to use the resources within their departmental structure to bring power on the international community through tools such as international trade. They have to take it, in the most senior level in government, and address this issue.

I just can't see what a campaign of public awareness is going to do on this issue. How are you going to engage countries like Japan and Europe to address this issue when they're in the same boat we are? They're losing jobs, they're losing employment, they're losing revenue, and they're also losing a resource. How are you going to do that? It couldn't be done before, and I don't think it's going to be done now, in that whole area.

The Chair: So you're basically saying we have to be much more aggressive, using all of the tools that are available.

Mr. Hearn.

Mr. Loyola Hearn: Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman.

Thank you, Ms. Dwyer, for coming in.

Let me say to the committee that the report we see is probably the most positive thing we've seen or heard all weekend. But this success story is due in large part...and anybody involved with the co-op is knowledgeable about... [Editor's Note--Inaudible] ...who's sitting at the table here, even though she mightn't agree with that. She has been around for quite a while, and her direction has helped quite a bit.

So certainly on our behalf, and I'm sure on behalf of the committee, I would like to say a sincere thank you to you for the time and effort you put in, and perhaps showing a new direction on what can be done in many rural communities that have suffered by what has happened in the fishery.

I'd like to make a couple of little points. First, you mentioned shrimp and your offshore shrimp quota. We basically indicated to the minister, who has said he doesn't think he'll withdraw the P.E.I. quota because they've come to depend on it...we followed up with a statement that, if you don't withdraw the P.E.I. quota, don't think about withdrawing the Newfoundland one. So hopefully you won't have any problem with your quota.

Secondly, you mentioned ice-breaking. It was an issue we raised yesterday collectively with the coast guard when we dealt with them about their services, and about cutbacks and rationalization. We specifically raised the issue of ice-breaking and went into it in some detail. They basically assured us that they will be looking after the people first. Providing transportation will be their main topic. Then it goes on down to sealers, and whatever. But they will do their best to do whatever can be done. We will be watching that to see if the services have been affected by their rationalization.

I have a couple of questions. You mentioned here the $425,000 annual investment by your shareholders. Does that include the $400,000 that you would derive from the shrimp, or is that above and beyond that money?

Ms. Bernadette Dwyer: The $425,000 is over and beyond that. That is what we put in ourselves. You see, we pay 5% of our earnings each year into the co-op, up to a ceiling. Our plant workers will pay up to a maximum of $300 a year, and our fishers $500 a year. We put that in annually, and at the present time there is $3.8 million of our money in our business. We get $400,000 from our offshore shrimp licence. We match it every year and matched it for 33 years before we got an offshore shrimp allocation.

The point we're trying to make is we are continually investing. We continue to be innovative and explore, to find markets for new underutilized species and new products, to better utilize the raw materials we have--all those types of things. That can only happen by continuously investing money and energy into the marketplace to try to identify those types of opportunities.

It's because of the structure of our business. We are community based, and therefore we have an obligation to do those things. This type of money is so important to an organization like ours because it helps us continue to do that work.

º (1655)

Mr. Loyola Hearn: You are quite right that the only way the shrimp fishery in the north can be prosecuted is by means of the large freezer trawlers because of quality markets, whatever, and the investment coming to a place like Fogo. Some areas will get nothing out of that, except a few jobs on boats. As you know, the private sector is going the way of profits. In this case, at least a Newfoundland community is benefiting from it, in the only way it probably could.

What about your inshore shrimp operation? Is that a viable operation? There are many arguments that the only profitable shrimp fishery is the northern one--the producer trawler, quickly frozen, into the market, quality product--whereas the inshore shrimp fishery is marginal at best, and may not be viable, depending on markets and tariffs. How are you finding this in Fogo?

Ms. Bernadette Dwyer: First of all, I have to get back to the structure of our organization to point out that we manage our operation in a holistic way. We look at all species that are available to us. We try to identify the best opportunities in the marketplace and the best utilization. Therefore, shrimp is one part of our operations, crab is one part, groundfish is one part, and pelagic species is one part.

We will continue to make all aspects of our business profitable. On some occasions, one is more profitable than the other. We have found, through our 35 years, our diversity has helped us succeed. There have been years when the price of turbot was down and capelin carried the day, and years when the price of shrimp was down and crab carried the day. You know, cod.... That diversity allows you to interact within your structure and carry the load.

We are in a position where we have to buy all species from our fishers, so they have successful operations. You know as well as I how competitive the fishing industry is. It doesn't work if we go out today and tell our fishers we can buy their crab, their prime product, but we can't buy their shrimp. We can't tell them to go out there and try to get the best price for their shrimp wherever they can, while we take their best supply--their bargaining tool.

We have to be able to buy it all, and by doing that we have to make a commitment to all. We have to make business decisions that allow us to be able to carry out our operation in a viable way.

As I said, one year it's up, the next year it's down. That's the way we look at our shrimp, crab, groundfish, and pelagic fish operations, and all other aspects of our business.

The Chair: Thank you so much, Madam Dwyer, for your presentation. I believe that's a positive note to end on.

As I said in a note to Rodger on this shrimp issue that Loyola brought up, we islands--Fogo and P.E.I.--have more than one reason to stick together, obviously.

Anyway, thank you very much for a well-documented presentation, and I wish you continued success in the future. We'll do what we can with the issues you've put before us.

Ms. Bernadette Dwyer: Thank you for this opportunity.

The Chair: We do have one short presentation that's really not related to the nose and tail, but may be related to the issue of dealing with Ottawa. While we're in the area, there's an individual here, Carl Powell, who has a short presentation to make as an individual.

So we'll take this opportunity to hear you, and then we will have to motor on.

Welcome, Carl. Just give us a little bit of your background first, and then we'll go from there. I understand you have a mining point of view to deal with in terms of dealing with Ottawa.

» (1700)

Mr. Carl Powell (Individual Presentation): Thank you, Mr. Chair, for allowing me a few minutes here.

I had a fellow with me, a retired professional engineer, Mr. Barron, but he had to leave on an important personal matter. I understand Mr. Loyola Hearn has offered his mailbox, and Leonard's going to send in his paper.

I couldn't be here yesterday. I'm a retired mining engineer. My name is Carl Powell. I'm not connected with any company now, or with any political party in any way. I've worked in South America, Quebec, and back to Newfoundland, and a little bit around the United States. I've a few points to make, and what prompted me to try to get a few minutes here today was Mr. Morgan's interview on television last night in which he said communities are being boarded up, and I know that. I've been around my island here and up in Labrador, and that's happening. Similar to that, almost parallel, mining towns are suffering too.

There's a common thread here about Ottawa being at fault. I disagree with that, but I'd like to make my few points here.

In all the places I've worked--I have friends in Galicia in Spain, which is where the Estai came out of, the port of Vigo--I've never seen or heard anybody else but Newfoundlanders using the words “underutilized species”, “bulk sales”, “bulk export”, and “over-the-side sales”. They don't seem to exist in any other fishing country, or in the Gulf of Mexico, which I'm a bit familiar with. I just wonder if over all these years, we've blamed other people for our resources being taken away.

Mr. John Efford, who spoke here today, our former provincial Minister of Fisheries, said along with other ministers of fisheries that last year our fishery was worth $1 billion. The problem I have with that is where? It's not here in Newfoundland. We're boarding up communities. We're losing our young population. We have no fishing industry here. This billion dollars is showing up somewhere else.

I have the same problem with mining revenue. The minister for mines will say our values are up about a billion dollars. That's mostly iron ore from Labrador. But that's not here. That's the net smelter value in other places, like Lake Superior or Michigan or down in Philadelphia.

Continuing along, if we take Labrador, for instance, the big iron ore mines that were very important in the Confederation days, 1949 and prior, these towns are now suffering--Labrador City and Wabush--and the populations are dropping. There are massive layoffs going down. That's not Ottawa's fault; it's a provincial matter. These resources are 99% provincial. I'm not that much of an expert on fisheries on the Grand Banks, but most of the resources we have in this province are provincially controlled, and we're the ones who make the mistakes. We're the ones who give it away.

And the infamous upper Churchill contract that we signed with Hydro Québec, the Province of Quebec, had very little to do with Ottawa. We keep blaming Ottawa. They wouldn't use the transmission lines through Quebec. We're doing the same things now with the lower Churchill.

One might look at just what we gave away. Mr. Hearn mentioned this about the upper Churchill, how it splits. In any development of a resource today, like hydro or mining, particularly hydro, you can count on a ratio of 22 to 1 for each megawatt generated. But with the upper Churchill, at 5,500 megawatts, we gave Quebec 122,000 high-paying jobs since the early 1970s. That's what we gave away.

We have, for example, in Labrador, a small town called Churchill Falls. I was talking with Mr. Burton, and it's very comparable to Kemano, the big aluminum power generation for Kitimat. That town doesn't exist any more. They burned it down as a practice burn, because technology.... If we go into the lower Churchill, we'll probably lose the upper Churchill employment because it'll be so computerized and whatever with modern technology. The same thing may happen that happened with Kemano. There's no town of Kemano now. There were about 100 employees or something like that. They're all gone.

We now have negotiations in effect in Labrador for aluminum smelters in the lower Churchill and it seems to me that present Minister of Mines is all too ready to take out his pen and sign that away because it's been the intention of Quebec--and I can't blame them--that any terms of the lower Churchill or any power developed in Labrador for Quebec must be on the same terms as the upper Churchill, right from Jean Lesage up through Henri Bourassa to Landry. Our minister now is worried again that we've got to find a transmission line in Quebec. I think he should forget it.

Look at Labrador and its hydro power: in total hydro power undeveloped and essentially a single watershed, we're next to the Three Gorges project in China. If you look at any source of statistics from the National Geographic, if any Canadian wants to see where we rank in hydro power, for instance, in Labrador, if you look it up you'll find first it's Hydro Quebec at 32,000 megawatts. If you go down through...I won't read out figures. You've got Ontario next, British Columbia, Manitoba, Alberta, Saskatchewan, Nova Scotia, and eighth is Newfoundland at 150 megawatts. That's Newfoundland Light and Power, because our power that's generated at upper Churchill is considered as generated in Quebec for equalization payments. And you know the racket we have with Ottawa on that.

I have every suspicion or feeling that the lower Churchill will be a similar issue. And it will be the Newfoundland government, it will be Newfoundlanders, not Ottawa, that will be signing this away with the Province of Quebec, with Hydro Quebec and Churchill Power's cooperation.

I'm going back to this ``underutilized'' word, this mentality we have. We have underutilized hydro power, we have underutilized iron ore, we have underutilized oil and gas off our Grand Banks and now on land out in Port au Port Peninsula. And there is one you may not know about. In Labrador City now they are excavating, taking out very high-grade silica, which is a quartzite at the Smokey deposit, that goes down on a Quebec railway to Seven Islands and then goes to Bécancour, where there's a big electric smelter, and they turn it into microchips, fibre optics and silicon wafers. We get about 4½¢ a tonne--that's a barrel rate--and I don't know what the value of the silicon is when it gets into Quebec. The mark-up must be enormous on the silicon.

With Voisey's Bay, the main thing...this is a connection with the fishery. If Voisey's Bay goes ahead with the Inco people, or with any people, with plans that I saw--and they've been formulated now for the last five or six years--the tailings from that will be acid generating. They will contain heavy metal such as nickel, copper and cobalt. Mercury and arsenic are in that ore body, and Inco won't address it and it's held very secret. Those tailings will go at the rate of five to six million gallons of toxic soup a day into Reid Lake, which is close to the Labrador coast and close to the Labrador current.

Now, if we get a failure on the dam with this miniature Sahara desert of toxic tailings and it hits the Labrador stream, we've got all our fishery problems solved because that will take it right down to the virgin rocks and it will kill everything it touches, particularly the bottom life where everything, I think, comes up in fish.

I've not seen the background that satisfies me, with some experience in these things, that would make that a very safe operation. In the last six to eight years we've had five major tailing dam failures in the world. The most famous one you might know of is in Spain at Los Frailes, in which a Canadian company was involved. They were all supposedly soundly engineered and built, but they failed.

Another thing in Labrador that has not been studied is that as you move westward into Quebec you pick up more seismic activity. It goes right up through. We had a very famous seismic activity here in 1929, and I've a strong belief, which grows all the time, that most of the oil that's showing up on the Grand Banks and doing in the birds is coming from cracks in the Grand Bank, because it's coming out of the Gulf of Mexico and off the Carolinas. We have leaks of oil that are coming up and we have the Gulf Stream coming up here. That oil may not be coming from ships. If we get more seismic activity like 1929 in the Grand Banks, we could have a major disaster in our fisheries that would be worldwide.

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I think it's been underestimated, the importance of the eco-engine of the Grand Banks. You have the Labrador current, you have the North Atlantic current, and you have the Gulf Stream. It forms the greatest eco-engine in fisheries that has ever been seen on this planet, from the bottom up, from hermit crabs to whales. You know, when Cabot came over, he recorded that you could lower baskets over and pick them up. He must have been on the Grand Banks when he did that.

Just to wrap it up here, on what things Ottawa may be responsible for, I think there's very little. In the fishery that's perhaps so, but we gave away in negotiations all the mineral rights to what's on the Grand Banks and what's under there--hydrocarbon, gases, building materials. From my understanding, that's 100% federal. We own nothing below the Grand Banks, whether it's three miles or more than two hundred. I think that was established in a court of law--Mr. Lalonde and Mr. Trudeau.

I'll offer just a little bit of humour, I guess, to end with. We have a paper mill out in Stephenville that makes newsprint. It's owned by Abitibi. It's a Quebec firm. And you know, Quebec really controls Labrador now. It's only a matter of time before.... It's now separate, as in Newfoundland and Labrador, so I think we've pushed it a little further to Quebec.

At any rate, we have a paper mill out there. Actually, it was a linerboard mill for making cardboard. Mr. Smallwood brought in a guy by the name of John C. Doyle, a fugitive from justice. He couldn't do anything with it, and it was sold to Abitibi for a dollar. It was to Premier Peckford, I think, that I mentioned it was a great mistake. “How?” he asked me. I told him we really missed a great opportunity; we should have converted it to gift wrap. We could have gift-wrapped our iron ore, the hydro, the oil and gas, the manganese, the silica, the nickel, the copper, etc. Just fill in the blank and let it go.

One final note, to no one in particular. I think one of the problems we've had since Confederation is that we keep electing MPs to Ottawa who by and large toe the line with the party and not with the province. People say, well, we can't do anything, we've only got seven members. It's going to go up because of the population shift in the census, but it still won't make any difference. Now, I have no particular love for Cuba, but I was in that era when Castro and Che Guevara came in, during the fifties. If we had seven Che Guevaras, we'd have a lot better province now. We just slide back and let it happen.

Thank you, sir.

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The Chair: Thank you very much, Carl. I guess nothing is ever as simple as it seems.

Does anybody want to raise a point or anything else?

Mr. Stoffer and Loyola, and then we'll call it quits.

Mr. Peter Stoffer: Thank you.

Sir, this is the first time I've heard, and perhaps the committee has heard, about oil actually occurring naturally, coming up from, say, the bottom, that this could be part of the reason so many seabirds are being killed. Where can we get further evidence, written evidence, of that?

Mr. Carl Powell: The best evidence I have is from following closely the expedition from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts. They were out off the Carolinas and they found these cracks in the continental shelf. They didn't know what they were, so they got drillers from Texas or Oklahoma, one from MIT and one from Princeton, and they went out and did it. It's been written up in a magazine called The Journal of Geology. It's a very technical geology magazine, but you'll find it there.

They've come to the conclusion that these cracks are natural gas cracks, and they have found evidence of a massive landslide that occurred and went offshore somewhere around 10,000 years ago, in an ice age. What piqued my interest was comparing it with what happened on the Grand Banks in November 1929. An epicentre of earthquakes somewhere in the southeast Atlantic shivered the Grand Banks, and there was a massive sloughing off. When that went out to sea, that took the sea out. The people said--if you read the history--that they saw the bottoms for the first time, in Lawn and Lewin's Cove and these places down there. Then the sea came in and took all the houses out, and the buildings, and we lost 29 people or something like that, and it came in again.

The Americans were probably the most thorough about finding out what happened on the Grand Banks. There were two big transatlantic cables that came up from Boston, and they broke. They knew where they broke and they found there was this massive earthslide that went down towards this epicentre. It was about six or something on the Richter scale at the time. McGill was the only place, and London, that had seismographs that recorded it. We now have one at Memorial and I guess at Dalhousie and a number of other places.

Going back to your point, the American satellite service and the geo service, GEO-1 or the successor satellite, now monitor the oil that's leaking out of the Bay of Campeche field in the Gulf of Mexico. It's coming up and it comes in around Florida. They measure its size and its age by the iridescence of the oil by satellite. The CIA probably has a big hand in that.

I've been watching this and I've asked the question twice at the White Rose hearings and the Terra Nova hearings. Hibernia was before my time. I was working in mining somewhere else. Is it possible that in 1929 we cracked the Grand Banks and there's oil leaking out of that? Every January or around then, a little after Christmas, these thousands or tens of thousands of oil birds start showing up off Trepassey and St. Mary's and along the south coast.

Surely it's a very simple matter for the Canadian navy or the coast guard to get down there at that time and find out who's doing this. There have only been two ships that I know of that have been charged, but not found guilty, of doing this, spilling bilge water or whatever. So where is this oil coming from?

I started to look into that with the Woods Hole people and National Geographic. I was absolutely amazed to find out that on the Grand Banks, the birds that migrated at this time of year.... They're now going north because it's summer, so they're coming up from there. They're not in flocks; they're in rafts. A raft of birds on the Grand Banks can be from four to seven million birds. When they're coming up from down south and they look down and they see this oil, of course it's oil on troubled waters and it's very calm, and that's what they go to land on. They go for that oil.

So we have oil there in that amount that's affecting these huge rafts of birds. Surely it's not coming from ships. We can't be that dumb in the coast guard or the navy to send someone out there at that time of year.

To get back to the politics, Mr. Anderson's name has come up here. He's mentioned that he's going to close the ports to ships that are convicted of dumping oil off the Nova Scotia coast because we now have birds coming ashore at Nova Scotia. Where was he when this happened in Newfoundland? It seems to me a small matter of just setting it up, and we have to rely on Woods Hole. I've talked with some other Woods Hole people who were doing work in the Labrador Trough. There's quite a lot of oil and gas up there. The Labrador Trough is just getting enough because of the birds. I suppose that will be federal responsibility too.

As far as I know, that is not finished yet, but they fear greatly that they will have a situation off the Carolinas with a tsunami that will come ashore as she slides down that continental shelf, which is parallel to the coast, like the earthquake that happened in 1929 in Newfoundland on the Grand Banks. I've asked the biggest oil companies that show up at these environmental hearings and I get no answer. Is it possible that we could have seismic activity on the Grand Banks that will shear off these drill holes? How will you stop it if it does? I don't want to sound like I'm predicting doom here, but the evidence mounts that there's oil leaking out of the Grand Banks. That's my opinion. Maybe when the Woods Hole is through, somebody will look into it.

I've corresponded with Dr. John Adams, who is a leading seismologist in Ottawa, and he sent me back quite a package. We had an earthquake here in 1973 down in the Burin area, actually around Baie d'Espoir. They think that was caused by the weight of the water in the Baie d'Espoir, the big reservoir down there for hydroelectric. The weight of the water on the plates caused that earthquake, which was 3.5 on the Richter.

I'll close off here with China. The experts, particularly in Canada, which has very good seismologists, are advising the government in China that the Three Gorges.... It's a huge thing, a 310-kilometre-long lake that they're going to form there. That weight on the plates in China may induce one of the most massive earthquakes they've ever seen. With their population, that could be really enormous.

There are a lot of things, and Voisey's Bay gives me a lot of concern. This company is allowed to go ahead with mostly provincial, but also federal, permission to do what they're going to do, without proper care or consideration for this very delicate fishery that you fellows know about, and these people here, and the presenters who have done it.

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One thing is--and our government and the nickel company don't seem to be aware of it---that we have a Labrador current that is just as famous as the Humboldt current. It runs at about nine knots. It's not a little, minor thing; it's draining the whole Arctic. Many people claim, and I presented this to DFO, that we have a lot of heavy metals coming from the Norilsk metal works in Russia on the eastern trade winds. They're coming across the Arctic and depositing down. It comes down in the Greenland current, the Labrador current, and down to the Grand Banks. I have a theory maybe that's what's bothering the salmon more than anything else, because they are extremely sensitive to heavy metals and their directions.

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The Chair: Thank you very much, Mr. Powell. You've certainly opened up a lot of areas to think about.

Was that your last question, Mr. Hearn? I believe, Mr. Burton, you can make one.

Mr. Loyola Hearn: I was going to ask a question, Mr. Chairman--

The Chair: Loyola, I think Mr. Burton had a point to make.

Mr. Loyola Hearn: I just wanted to make a point.

The Chair: Okay.

Mr. Loyola Hearn: I agree with Mr. Powell. I wish we had the seven Che Guevaras in Avalon. It's pretty lonely fighting by yourself.

Some hon. members: Oh, oh!

Mr. Loyola Hearn: The only line actually that any Newfoundland MP, and I don't care what stripe, should be obligated to toe in Ottawa is a Newfoundland line. If we don't toe that, we shouldn't be there.

Mr. Carl Powell: I hope I was clear in saying that 99% of our troubles are up there on Confederation Hill.

Mr. Efford, who has much more experience, and Mr. Etchegary, ask “Where is everybody?” I was at a conference, a presentation of a mining company from British Columbia, on the lower Voisey's Bay nickel--there's another big deposit further south than the famous one--and I would like to have been here, because this is a tremendous thing.

I'll give you a little note. When I first went to South America in the mid to late fifties, the ship we went down on was a combination cruise and cargo boat. It had a lot of salt fish on pallets. Fifty tons is just a little thing in the hold of the ship, but it was a lot of fish, and it came from Norway and was going down to Jamaica. It didn't come from Nova Scotia or Newfoundland. When I got down there, I found a cookbook, and I said, “If Dad could only see this.” We had a cookbook that came from Portugal telling how to cook salt fish 26 different ways. And I added one--27.

The Chair: Thank you, Mr. Powell.

Mr. Burton, last point.

Mr. Andy Burton: I just want to make a point that I've done a fair bit of research into the oil and gas industry because of the potential off the coast of British Columbia. You mentioned the seismic activity and the concern for oil rigs. I think that is a concern, but rigs are designed to withstand some fairly substantial seismic activity. For instance, I think there are something like 4,000 oil rigs in the Gulf of Mexico, where they do have earthquake activity. That is designed into oil rigs.

But the point I wanted to make was that my understanding is approximately 7% of the oil found in the world's oceans is natural seepage. There's oil seeping all over, underneath. It's a natural phenomenon. I believe it's 7%, which is a pretty significant amount--just for your information.

Mr. Carl Powell: As a final comment, the other expert and perhaps one of the better leading experts on what happened in 1929 is a Dr. Alan Ruffman, a professor at Dalhousie. I think he has his own company. He's very internationally renowned. He gave a lecture here on just what happened, with photographs that were taken by a local priest at the time in 1929. He said this was a one-in-one-hundred-year event. I've talked with him since. Most scientists and seismologists now say it's less than 100 years. Let's say it's 75 years; from 1929, we're getting close to something else happening, and it's rather worrisome.

The Chair: Thank you very much, Mr. Powell. There is some very interesting information here, and it raises a lot of questions. I will say the committee is still looking into the oil and gas issue off Cape Breton as well, and its impact on one of the most sensitive fisheries in the country.

With that, committee members, we stand ready to adjourn. Tomorrow we will head to Canso--no, to Sydney. I had Canso on my mind, I guess, from what's happening. We'll head to Sydney, Nova Scotia, tomorrow, then Gaspé on Tuesday and Rimouski on Wednesday.

The meeting is adjourned. Thank you very much for your endurance.