:
Thank you very much Mr. Chairman.
Mr. Chairman, members of the committee, on behalf of Minister Gail Shea I would like to thank you for the opportunity to appear before you again to discuss aquaculture in British Columbia.
As you may recall from my appearance before you on March 22, I am the Director General of the Aquaculture Management Directorate of the Department of Fisheries and Oceans. My role in the department is to support the deputy minister and minister in providing national-level strategic guidance to the department's aquaculture program. In this vein I have been leading the department's work to develop a new aquaculture regime for British Columbia.
My goals here today are to: describe for you the process used to develop the proposed Pacific aquaculture regulations; highlight the main content points of the regulations; and summarize our plans for implementing the regulations when they come into force.
I should note at the outset that my remarks are made from the perspective of the Department of Fisheries and Oceans and are not presented as legal opinions or advice to the committee. Discussion of the legal aspects of these issues is beyond my expertise and mandate.
[English]
For the next few minutes I will no longer inflict my French on you. I will switch to English instead.
The committee has no doubt already been provided with contextual material on aquaculture in general, and in British Columbia in particular, with a particular emphasis on the British Columbia Supreme Court decision on aquaculture. I will not, therefore, rehash that general material here for you this morning. Instead, I'd like to just cut straight to the chase and focus on the emerging regulatory regime for aquaculture in the province.
As the committee will recall, in February 2009, the B.C. Supreme Court ruled that finfish aquaculture is a fishery and that the elements of the B.C. provincial aquaculture regulatory regime that address fisheries aspects of finfish aquaculture are beyond provincial jurisdiction. The court therefore struck down the finfish aquaculture waste control regulation and directed that the provisions of the British Columbia Fisheries Act that deal with aquaculture be read down to apply only to marine plants.
The court also ruled that the provisions of the Farm Practices Protection Act that apply to fisheries aspects of aquaculture are also invalid. The court, however, did uphold the province's authority to issue leases and tenures for aquaculture operations using these lands. In recognition that a new regulatory regime could not be put in place overnight, the court suspended its decision for one year to February 10, 2010. This suspension was subsequently extended by the court to December 18, 2010, at which point it will come fully into effect.
The net effect of the decision is that whilst provincial responsibilities with respect to leasing the land base for aquaculture remain in place, provincial regulations addressing finfish and shellfish operational matters, such as environmental management, escape prevention, net strength, and so forth, have been struck down and must be replaced by the federal government.
The Department of Fisheries and Oceans has responded to the decision by developing the Pacific aquaculture regulations. In November of 2009, the department issued a discussion document describing the nature of the issue and posing a series of strategic questions for public comment. Workshops were held in Campbell River, Comox, and Nanaimo. Separate workshops were held with first nations under the auspices of the Aboriginal Aquaculture Association, using funding provided to the association by the department.
In addition, under the leadership of the British Columbia First Nations Fisheries Council, 10 first nations workshops were held in first nations communities across the province to outline the nature of the regulatory issues and to directly receive first nations input and views on these issues.
Final reports summarizing these processes were submitted to the department in early April. Throughout that period, several meetings were also held with the Canadian Alliance for Aquaculture Reform, with industry associations, with several individual companies, and with other stakeholders.
Finally, we received approximately 1,200 items of correspondence via our website and regular departmental mail with respect to the proposals.
This wide-ranging input was coupled with our own internal analysis and led to the development of the proposed Pacific aquaculture regulations, which were published in the Canada Gazette, part I on July 10, 2010.
Committee members will of course have read the regulations, so I'll just highlight several key points in them rather than going through them section by section.
Importantly, proposed section 1 of the regulations, among other things, defines aquaculture as quite simply “the cultivation of fish”. This means that the regulations cover all aquaculture in British Columbia and not just salmon farming. Shellfish, finfish, and freshwater aquaculture operations will be captured under the regulation. In addition, in order to ensure that all hatcheries in the province will be held to similar standards, salmon enhancement hatcheries will also be covered by the regulation.
Section 2 of the regulations stipulates that they will apply only in British Columbia, a point worth emphasizing. The federal government has no plan to expand their application to any other part of Canada and has no intention of seeking the resources or the policy mandate that would be required to do so. This is a regulation that was made for British Columbia and will apply only in British Columbia.
The regulations will create a federal aquaculture licence regime. When they come into force, there will be a new federal aquaculture licence that anyone wishing to conduct aquaculture in British Columbia will be required to hold. Conducting aquaculture without such a licence will be prohibited under the regulations. Aquaculture operators in the future will be required to hold this new licence, to have a permit for their site under the Navigable Waters Protection Act, and to have a provincial lease.
The regulations authorize the minister to attach a comprehensive suite of conditions to any licence issued under the regulations. These provisions really are the core of the regulations in many ways. They provide the department, we think, with all the tools it needs to effectively manage all aspects of the industry in British Columbia. And every effort has been made to equip the department with the authority to address all aspects of aquaculture management within the context of our mandate.
In keeping with normal practice for fisheries management regulations, this section has been designed to be enabling in nature. It sets out a menu of tools for the department to use, so that licences can be tailored to address the particular management needs of each component of the industry, rather than simply taking a prescriptive cookie-cutter approach.
In many respects, the regulations and conditions in section 4 closely reflect the existing provincial regulatory regime. As a result, to a considerable degree, at least in the short term, operational realities for the industry will not change--production limits will not increase, benthic layer protection standards will not change, and no new sites will be authorized as part of the transition to the federal regime.
However, it is our intent to fully utilize the new regulatory provisions to compel the production of operational and environmental monitoring information by licence holders, and it's our intent to publish this information on our website on a regular basis. In 2011, information regarding licence terms and conditions, farm-related environmental monitoring data, sea lice levels, disease incidences and responses, fish escapes, and a host of other operational matters will be posted on the DFO website pursuant to the information-related provisions of these regulations. In short, we see this regulation as one that will substantially enhance the transparency of the industry in British Columbia.
I would like to also comment briefly on what is not in the regulations. We have not yet included provisions for the charging of a fee for the licences established under the regulations. As part of the posting of the regulations in the Canada Gazette, part l, the government indicated its intent to establish a fee schedule for the licences. We did so in the regulatory impact analysis statement. However, at that time, we had not yet determined whether fees charged for these licences would fall under the ambit of the User Fees Act. We have now concluded that the User Fees Act likely does apply to fees to be charged under these regulations, and we will be bringing forward a fee proposal for the committee's consideration later this fall.
We have received a wide range of comments on the proposed regulations and are carefully working through this feedback to develop proposals for cabinet consideration as we move forward to final gazetting. We may well be preparing some changes to the final version. The committee will appreciate, of course, that I am not at liberty to discuss these changes until they are decided upon and published in the Canada Gazette, part II. I can assure you, however, that we are very much on track to have the regulations in place before the court deadline.
Turning briefly from the regulations themselves, our primary preoccupation right now is actually upon building the program needed to effectively implement the regulations once they're in place. In June 2010, Treasury Board approved the department's submission outlining an $8.3 million annual program to administer the regulations, plus an additional $7 million in start-up costs over the first two years. This funding is incremental to the departmental base. The new programming will not be established through reallocation of existing resources or priorities from elsewhere.
With this new funding in place, we have begun the process of securing office space and obtaining equipment, including vehicles, boats, diving equipment, and the like. We have launched several recruiting processes, which are well under way, and we expect to have new staff in place later this year. We expect that our new program staff will be located predominantly on the island, in communities like Campbell River, Nanaimo, and Courtenay, and there may be a few in Vancouver--and maybe even one here in Ottawa, but I doubt it.
At the same time, we have been working to develop generic licence templates for public review over the next several weeks. These templates will be sent to licence holders, stakeholders, first nations, and others this week. They set out a set of generic conditions for their review. We are also working through the detailed operational guidelines and policies to accompany these licences and to guide operations over the longer term. In many instances, they are simply identical to existing provincial terms and conditions; in others, we are developing new operational requirements, particularly in the area of information reporting. We have also launched the work needed to build the information management and licensing systems over the longer term.
As part of our program design, we are also in the process of establishing a substantial new conservation and protection unit made up of fisheries officers whose primary role will be to enforce compliance with the new regulations. This unit will be established with new resources and will be incremental to the existing conservation and protection program. It will not be created by reallocating resources or priorities from elsewhere. It will establish a substantial enforcement presence on the water specifically focused on aquaculture.
Mr. Chairman, this has been a very busy year for the aquaculture community in British Columbia and for those involved in regulating and managing it. However, we are coming close to the completion of a new regulatory regime that we feel will substantially improve regulatory efficiency, effectiveness, and transparency. We have the resources in place to do the job. Much work remains to be done to get the new program fully up and running, but we have made real progress over the last six months and we look forward to continuing this work in the months ahead.
In closing, I would like to thank the committee once again for the opportunity to be here today. In the unlikely event that you have any questions for me, I'd be happy to address them.
Voices: Oh, oh!
Mr. Trevor Swerdfager: Mr. Blais, one of the things I would say in my second crack at this is in the context of the public workshops that we've held. I've stood at the front of a room in Campbell River for two and a half days and listened to people tell me that DFO and the people who work for it are not to be trusted. There's a very high degree of skepticism about whether or not we will follow through with what we say we will do.
I stood at the front of a room in Comox-Courtenay for a day and a half and heard the same thing. I've spent a lot of time meeting with first nations talking about this regulation and where it's expected to go, and again, a recurring theme, quite frankly, has been that there's a high degree of skepticism about what DFO says and what it will do.
When I meet with members of the environmental community, I talk to them about what we're planning to do and their response is usually of a nature of the kinds of comments that won't enter into the record here today. But I very rarely get a response to the effect that it's good to have DFO here and we're really happy to have you.
So I'm familiar with the skepticism and the difficulty you may have in believing me when I say that things are moving along in a way that is good.
We have been working very closely with our provincial colleagues, and please don't interpret this as just Pollyannaish and everything is marvellous and sweetness and light and so on. My colleagues--and I think of them as my colleagues--who work for the provincial government are not happy about this. There are people who have spent their entire careers building a program, building an administrative arrangement, and so on. This is what they do, and it's been taken away from them for nothing that they did. So many of them are hurting very much, and many of them feel personally a sense of loss and grief, and I don't mean to trivialize that in any way. At the same time, they're very much in the mode that the earth has moved; the court has ruled what it has ruled. This is not a time to say, fold your arms and be resistant. We're not doing it. That won't work.
So right from the outset, an awful lot of our discussion with the province was to say, okay, fine, we're stuck with this. The federal government didn't do this. We didn't go in and advocate taking on this role. The province didn't advocate moving it away, but this is what the court gave us to work with. And the response from the two bureaucracies and the leadership has been to say, okay, these are the new rules of the game; let's figure out how to work within them.
We have encountered very few problems in the discussions around how to make that happen, and to the extent that we have, they've been largely around logistical problems: how are we going to do this, this, and this?
But to give you an example of just how things are working, we're right down to the stage where the province has vessels and vehicles that they're no longer going to need, and we're working on arrangements to just transfer...more or less at cost, if that. It's that level of collaboration that's there. We're determined to make this work, and the province has just been there right from the beginning.
I was going to say I apologize if I make this sound too good. That's a bad way to put it. I just have to report, in all honesty, that things have been really good in terms of the relationship with them, and I think it will be going forward.
With respect to research, I think the first thing to talk about is that in Budget 2008 the government established what we call the sustainable aquaculture program. The government invested $70 million in new funding in aquaculture at large. This is prior to and independent of the B.C. case. As part of that, we established what's called the program for aquaculture regulatory research. This fiscal year that we're in now has, under that program, 17 new positions for aquaculture-related research. Six of those are going into British Columbia; two, I think it was last year, went into B.C., and one the year before. The program has a five-year timeframe, and it ramps up over time. This is year three. Next year there will be an additional 17 researchers going into aquaculture research nationally. I don't have the breakdown nationally, but there will be more in B.C.
I share your view that in the past the absence of research on all sides of this issue—not just from a DFO perspective—has been a problem. A big part of the government's approach to aquaculture in general on the sustainable aquaculture program is to tie its research to the regulatory issues, as opposed to pure curiosity-driven research on aquaculture issues in general. We're hoping that over time, as these resources fully come on line and individuals are in the positions and their research is undertaken and results start to emerge, we'll have research results that are much more pointed and focused on the regulatory questions.
In this case, obviously we would focus some of them on British Columbia, but many of the issues we're dealing with are national, so the research energy is devoted across the country. The bottom line is that we will, independently of this decision, end up with a substantially new research presence in B.C. that will enhance our ability, we think anyway, to manage the resource.
With respect to the debate about wild versus farmed and its relative priority, you've put your finger on a point that comes forward regularly in the public consultations. Some of the questioning is fundamentally around the role and the nature of government. There are those who argue that regulatory and management functions—it doesn't matter whether it's fisheries or forests or agriculture or what have you—shouldn't be in the same place. Others argue that it should be.
To wrap up very quickly, then, on that point, essentially the approach we're taking is that this gives us an opportunity to manage marine ecosystems in an integrated way. Fisheries and Oceans will have access to the management tools, if you will, for the full suite of things that need to be done in a marine ecosystem context, in a way that we think anyway will allow for a much more integrated approach to management of all resource uses.
I'll come back to your third question in the next turn around, if I may.
:
No, I'm sorry, I misspoke.
There will not be a data gap per se. I phrased my response poorly. Essentially, what we're trying to do is to build a brand-new information management system that will bring together the diversity of data, some of which you identified. There's a whole range of data and information on the federal side as well.
Complicating matters perhaps slightly is that the provincial government reorganized itself yesterday, so the responsibilities for aquaculture have moved within provincial ministries and that will be potentially an additional complicating factor for us going forward.
What we're in the process of doing is building an information management system that will take what we have already, because we've got quite a robust licensing system of our own, and we will bolt it onto that for our existing fishing licences and so on. So in terms of a lot of the licensing information, we think we'll be able to simply expand that which we have already today.
For the environmental monitoring information that comes to us, we are building the system that will effectively store, manage, and organize that, and a lot of that we already had, because a lot of the information the province got, we got as well. So that's a matter of just integrating it slightly differently, but the challenge there is not huge.
But causing all this to come together in a way whereby we can depict the full range, all the fields of the information that we need to deal with, is a major undertaking, you're quite right. I would say that in terms of making the transition from the status quo to the future, that, in the longer term, is the single biggest chunk of work to undertake.
Having said that, I misspoke, I guess, in that I wouldn't want to leave the committee with any impression at all that when information on monitoring compliance reporting and so on starts flowing into us early in 2011--if we go live on December 19, we're not going to have data reports on December 20, but as those information fields start coming, we're ready for that. We have systems in place to store it as it comes to us. We will not have the single integrating system that will allow it all to be perfectly and seamlessly integrated right away.
We also will probably not have completed building the web interface. I mentioned earlier we're planning to post all of this. We will not do that on January 1. We will do that by the spring. I'm hoping it'll be earlier than that. I don't have a date for when we'd go live. So when I said “in 2011”, I meant early...i.e., not in December.
I did a search on Google just before coming back to this aspect... The first time I learned about the existence of aquaculture and that it could be something of great interest was when a company set up business in Chaleur Bay in my region at St-Omer, a lovely spot in our area. The company was called Baie des Chaleurs Aquaculture Inc. It was during the 1980s. At that time, if I remember correctly, they had set up the pools right next to the company, close to the shore, and later on, the same pools were installed inside the factory. In other words, they were installed on land and supplied with salt water. This was during the 1980s, I do not know exactly when; I was just looking for some information about this.
Thus, attempts have been made. And to my knowledge, the project was aborted not because it could not make a profit or anything like that, but because the company had developed too fast. Parasites set in along with diseases and the company's financial capabilities were not sufficient to quickly face this catastrophic situation. But this did not exclude the possibility of practising aquaculture. I think that they were working with salmon or with speckled trout and they were working in enclosed pools, but with a supply of salt water. This makes me think that for all kinds of reasons, aquaculture failed in some places, but it succeeded in other places. Clearly, in British Columbia, it has been a success, because we hear about it and we know that the installations are quite impressive.
To come back to the subject that we discussed a bit earlier, namely that there was no aquaculture in enclosed pools, do the things that I say remind you of some elements, even if you have to revisit what you told me a bit earlier? Not at all? All right.
I respectfully submit this question to you, and I think it would be interesting for you to take a close look at it. I know that eventually, you might come back before this committee, and we will have another opportunity to exchange opinions about these things, but I would be very interested to know what you think.
Regarding salmon lice, to my knowledge, the products they are using are chemical. Have any new products been developed? Are they potentially less dangerous than the products currently used against salmon lice?