FISH Committee Meeting

STANDING COMMITTEE ON FISHERIES AND OCEANS

COMITÉ PERMANENT DES PÊCHES ET DES OCÉANS

EVIDENCE

[Recorded by Electronic Apparatus]

Tuesday, January 20, 1998

• 1708

[English]

The Chairman (Mr. George Baker (Gander—Grand Falls, Lib.)): Order.

Ladies and gentlemen, we apologize for not having enough seats for everybody.

Before we officially open the meeting, I want to introduce to you the members of Parliament who are here as part of this standing committee meeting that is being held under Standing Order 108(2); namely, a study of west coast fisheries. Ten public meetings are being held in fishing communities on the coast of British Columbia. During these meetings we have the chief spokespersons for each of the political parties in the House of Commons. After these meetings, we'll be presenting a report to the House of Commons.

I want to introduce the members to you.

• 1710

We are happy to see that Mr. Svend Robinson could show up here today. He is the MP for Burnaby—Douglas. Next to Svend is Libby Davies, the member for Vancouver East. Peter Stoffer is from Nova Scotia. He is the chief spokesperson for the New Democratic Party of Canada in the House of Commons. Peter attended school here but now sits as a member for Nova Scotia.

I note as well, Mr. Stoffer, that your mom and dad are here.

Representing the Bloc in the House of Commons we have their chief spokesperson, MP Yvan Bernier. For the Progressive Conservative Party of Canada we have their spokesperson who writes their policy on fisheries and oceans, a former cabinet minister in the Government of Newfoundland and Labrador, MP Bill Matthews.

Representing the Liberal side—and I'll get to the members here in just a moment—from the province of British Columbia we have MP Sophia Leung; from the province of New Brunswick, MP Charles Hubbard; and from the province of Ontario, MP Carmen Provenzano. We have the parliamentary secretary—sometimes we refer to him as the junior minister of fisheries and oceans—from Prince Edward Island, MP Wayne Easter.

We also have the spokesperson for the Reform Party of Canada in the House of Commons on fisheries and oceans, MP John Duncan.

I am now going to pass the meeting over to the vice-chairman of our standing committee for the west coast. He is a new member of Parliament. He is from British Columbia and he is a Reform member of Parliament, Mr. Gary Lunn.

The Vice-Chairman (Mr. Gary Lunn (Saanich—Gulf Islands, Ref.)): I'm going to take one minute and outline our mandate.

We are not the Government of Canada, we are not the Department of Fisheries and Oceans. You have here ten MPs representing all five political parties and we report to the House of Commons. We have travelled through Atlantic Canada. We are now travelling through the Pacific coast, British Columbia, visiting ten communities. Our goal is to work towards solutions and hopefully write a unanimous report and make recommendations to the House of Commons. So your voices will be heard. We're not here to speak; we're here to listen to you and that's what we intend to do. We will not be asking questions. At the very end each member may have a few minutes to speak.

We have the Hon. David Anderson, Minister of Fisheries and Oceans, who is going to be speaking first.

I'm going to ask John Cummins, who is your member of Parliament for this riding, to say an open welcome before we go to the minister.

Mr. John Cummins (Delta—South Richmond, Ref.): As the member of Parliament for Delta—South Richmond, it's a pleasure for me to welcome the standing committee to this community. It is especially a pleasure to welcome the members of the audience here.

The chairman, Mr. Baker, has a longstanding interest in fisheries issues, and it's certainly a pleasure to welcome him in particular into the community. He is a man whose expertise on the east coast fisheries is well recognized in the House of Commons, and he is certainly not one to be muzzled. I thank him most importantly for the longstanding interest that he has shown in west coast fisheries issues.

As well, I'd like to make a special welcome to Steveston to Yvan Bernier, the member from the Bloc. In my time on the fisheries committee Mr. Bernier was a great help in allowing us to advance the issues of west coast concerns to the parliamentary committee. This was in the last Parliament. So it is certainly a pleasure for me to welcome him here.

• 1715

I raise this issue of Mr. Bernier's and Mr. Baker's long-standing interest in fisheries issues because it stands in stark contrast to the situation here on the west coast, where the past two directors general we've had in the fisheries department...one of them came from the Department of Agriculture, where I believe his main interest was potatoes, before he was appointed the director general, and the next one was handing out flags for Sheila Copps in the Department of Canadian Heritage.

Something that has bothered us all in this community is the issue that many ministers of fisheries have shown little interest in the fishery before being appointed and they seem to view fisheries as just another step up the ministerial ladder. There hasn't been a long-term commitment. Many don't last longer than about half the life cycle of the average sockeye. It's tough to understand how they can make a decision.

Enough of that. My job here is to drive the welcome wagon.

To that end, I would like to welcome not only the members of the committee but also those members of the audience here who have been charged by the Department of Fisheries and Oceans for standing up for their rights. I know there are a number of them in the audience. Maybe they could stand up so the members of the committee can know who they are talking about.

I would also like to welcome Mr. Anderson and Mr. Evans. In welcoming Mr. Anderson I would say to him that I hope in his address he takes time to justify the exclusive native fishery on the Fraser River.

Mr. Chairman, the average Fraser River gillnetter last year caught about 2,100 sockeye, worth about $13,000. The one million fish that were caught by natives in their fishery, a fishery illegally created by the minister, represents about 40% of the Fraser River catch. This illegal fishery took 1,500 fish, worth $10,000, from every Fraser River gillnetter. That's the fact. I would like to know how the minister can justify this piracy on the Fraser River and how he can continue this racially divisive policy. I hope in his address he answers that question. In addition, I would like the provincial minister, Mr. Evans, to tell us why, given the province has the authority to end this fishery, he has chosen to do nothing.

With that, Mr. Chairman, welcome to Steveston. I look forward to an interesting afternoon. Thank you.

The Vice-Chairman (Mr. Gary Lunn): Thank you, Mr. Cummins.

Now I would like to call on Minister Anderson to make an address, please.

The Honourable David Anderson (Minister of Fisheries and Oceans): Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

It's my pleasure, Mr. Chairman, Mr. Vice-Chairman, and members of the committee, to welcome you to British Columbia, my home province. Also, it's a pleasure to be here, some hundred metres in fact from where my great-grandfather established one of his canneries back in the 1880s and where indeed the family has had a long connection with the fishing industry.

I know many people are making presentations today. Therefore, Mr. Baker, I have followed your instructions religiously, even if it may disappoint Mr. Cummins, in keeping my presentation extremely short.

I'm here because I want committee members to know what is being done, in very general terms, by the Department of Fisheries and Oceans to conserve, protect, and manage our fisheries and ocean environment here on the west coast. In British Columbia we have approximately 2,300 DFO employees, who work on a budget of approximately $240 million. Our job in British Columbia does include 190 co-management agreements with first nations communities and the management, of course, of a very important recreational fishery as well.

• 1720

Now, the overriding objective in this province, as elsewhere, is conservation and protecting the marine resources for future generations. But there is a substantial fishery as a secondary but very important objective as well, and by that I mean a fishery that both conserves the fish stocks and provides a good living for the people in the industry itself. I do not see as an objective simply a subsistence fishery for British Columbia. I see an industry that pays the people in it adequate amounts of money so they can care for their families at the decent level they deserve.

With respect to the fishery of the future, I see five principles: it must be environmentally sustainable; it must be economically viable; I regret to say it has to be somewhat smaller than it is today, in my view; it must be internationally competitive; and it must be self-reliant.

I have tabled before you and the members of the committee a discussion of management techniques in several different fisheries. I hope you will have a look at it. I will just quickly say now that the main elements of the management strategy are: fisheries management that takes a cautious approach to setting harvest levels and even, where necessary, reducing them; reducing the number of commercial salmon boats by half over several years; and a new approach to licensing that establishes separate fishing areas based on type of gear used.

I'd like to say quickly that this strategy is paying off, despite the environmental conditions—

Witnesses: Oh, oh!

An hon. member: We're in a church!

Mr. David Anderson: Despite adverse environmental conditions such as El Niño, despite the problems we've had in Fraser River levels, we met or exceeded most of our escapement objectives for 1997, and there is a bar chart there, which you will see in the presentation I've given you, that makes that very clear indeed. In fact, we succeeded last year with respect to the levels both for escapement and, of course, the catch in a way that I think is really worth looking at.

Now, while conservation is the first priority, we also want—and let me stress this—a fishing industry that makes money. We do not want to have a subsistence fishery, nor will you, I believe. There is no conflict between economic viability and a conservation-based fishery, none at all; they support one another. But it is essential to recognize the importance of price and changing markets on the economic viability of the salmon industry, and I'll come back to that later.

We also must recognize that a profitable fishing industry requires, sadly, a smaller fishing fleet, and we have taken steps to achieve that goal. The Pacific salmon licence retirement program has been introduced, and in the presentation that you have you will find detailed information on the results of that program. Looking at the results of that program, relating it to income of fishermen, you will see it has been a success. There were 31% fewer salmon fishing vessels on the water in 1997 than two years ago, when the program started in 1995. This was a combined result of licence stacking, of course, and the licence buy-back program. A recent independent audit report on this program showed it had met its goals.

So with the number of vessels reduced, the catch is being shared by a smaller number of fishermen. This has improved the economic health of the fleet and raised the average earnings per vessel.

Witnesses: Oh, oh!

Mr. David Anderson: I urge you to have a look at the actual dollar figures that are contained in the presentation that I tabled for you. Although the price of salmon is now at an all-time low, earnings last year were higher than they would otherwise have been had we not reduced the number of vessels.

Witnesses: Oh, oh!

Mr. David Anderson: In 1997 the commercial catch was approximately $18.7 million and the price of sockeye was roughly $1.32 a pound, which was a decrease of approximately 40% from two years previously and 30% over the year before. But six years before that, in 1988, we had a price averaging $3.69 a pound. Ask yourselves how this industry can manage when you have the price of the resource, which means the return to the fishermen in this room, reduced to two thirds, down to one third of what it was in 1988. Consider what that does to their income. Consider what that does to their livelihood. Consider, members of this committee, what that does to their families and their lives.

• 1725

We need, as I said earlier, a commercial fishing industry that is internationally competitive and self-reliant. We are but a small segment of the international salmon industry. We do not dictate prices. We are in fact, in terms of percentages, relatively small, and that has declined over time.

Our goal is to manage that industry in partnership with the fishing industry, and I stress that. We want to make sure that in future we have the partnership arrangements so that in fact it is a joint effort and we get the best of everybody's opinion and advice and help.

With the objective of co-management in mind, ladies and gentlemen, I will be introducing an amended Fisheries Act in the House of Commons when we go back in February, or early in March, as the case may be.

In addition, we are establishing on the west coast a joint Pacific fisheries resource conservation council to provide independent advice on conservation issues related to Pacific salmon and their habitats. We expect that council to be in operation by late spring of this year.

The final point I want to discuss, because of the restrictions placed upon me by time, is the work of Dr. David Strangway and Mr. William Ruckelshaus. That was an important report. They have four recommendations, but the one I will touch on now is that we negotiate interim fishing arrangements with the U.S. over the next two years. This will not be easy. We all know the difficulty of negotiating with the Americans on salmon, but we do not want to have a repeat of the events of 1997.

We intend to begin, as soon as we can get the parties to the table, to negotiate interim arrangements. I hope they can be in place early for the 1998 season and we do not have the same problem we had last year.

Ladies and gentlemen, the oceans and the fisheries are important in the coastal communities of British Columbia—very important. I fully intend to do whatever I can to have this resource base continue to provide economic opportunities through the commercial fisheries, through recreation, tourism, and the ocean-related industries.

In conclusion, I just want to reiterate that our primary goal has to be conservation, but we are committed to achieving an environmentally sustainable, economically viable fishery here on the west coast of the country.

I welcome any questions you may have.

The Vice-Chairman (Mr. Gary Lunn): Thank you, Mr. Minister.

I don't believe we are going to entertain questions at this time. We haven't done that in any of the communities we have visited. We are here to listen to the people. I thank you for your comments.

I'm going to ask all the other speakers if they can try to keep their comments down. Right now we have a schedule that takes us well into the evening. I have every intention of staying here until everyone who wants an opportunity to speak has a chance to speak.

We're not going to go by this list hard and fast. There is a number of fishermen. We will move from pulling from the audience to going from the list. With that in mind, if you can keep your comments to around five minutes—I know some of you have been promised a little longer—you will allow everybody an opportunity to speak.

Having said that, I am now going to go to the Hon. Corky Evans, the Minister of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food for the province of British Columbia.

The Honourable Corky Evans (Minister of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food, Government of British Columbia): Thank you, Mr. Chairman. First I would like to express my appreciation to the Coast Salish people whose traditional territory this is, my thanks to the United Church for letting us use the building, and my thanks to the committee for coming so far to let us make our thoughts known.

Lots of people here have heard me speak in the past. Two things that I don't think anybody has ever heard me do is say something I thought out ahead of time and wrote down and the other is talk fast. I'm going to do both of those things in the interest of your time constraints. Mr. Chair, if I speak too fast you can stop me or slow me down. I will attempt to commit to keeping your timetable.

I decided some time ago that the visit of your committee to British Columbia was an opportunity too important to miss by virtue of British Columbia's arguments with Canada over the Mifflin plan and the salmon treaty, highlighted last year by the comments of Senator Pat Carney. It's my bet that just about every member of your committee in the House of Commons knows that something is broken in British Columbia over fish. My objective today is to try to pinpoint what that something might be and what we might do about it.

• 1730

I've read lots of times in the Globe and Mail that central Canada thinks our difficulties are driven by politics and therefore posturing and therefore dismissible. Nothing could be further from the truth. If you leave B.C. believing that, I will have failed.

Everywhere in the world fish and fishing are changing rapidly. Some influences are driven by technology, leading to increased capitalization and increased capacity. Others are driven by the monetary policies of the World Bank driving countries to fish for export income rather than for food. Some are driven by science and genetics and the coming of age of aquaculture, where fishing as a gathering activity is giving way to protein production as a farming activity. Some are driven by globalization itself and what our former premier used to call the race to the bottom as countries compete with one another to create the operating environment at the lowest cost. Some are driven by the incredible isolation and alienation experienced in urban settings all over the world, leading to a market where those who can afford it will pay more for the opportunity to experience fishing than they would as consumers to pay for the fish themselves.

Of course every one of the above impacts on the other and energizes it, accelerating what might be an evolutionary change and somewhat predictable to a kind of exponential speed of change where small mistakes in biology or economics can wipe out a species or bankrupt a business in a single season.

None of this is new. At the same time, if you hear it, as I have, from the mouths of the people who are living it from day to day, it's brand-new and it's terrifying every morning. That contradiction, the difference between my analysis as words and people's experience out there, is what turns fish from a subject of civil discourse into politics.

Long before fish became a subject of political discussion in British Columbia the role of DFO had already begun to change. I've been in lots of places in B.C. where DFO used to be the single most respected government presence in the entire region. That respect was based on the integrity of the individuals in the organization and on the respect of the people in the community for their biology.

In recent years that respect has tended to dissipate somewhat, not because DFO personnel are any less qualified, but because, I believe, DFO has become somewhat a captive of economists and theory rather than biologists and practice.

For example, if you were an economist studying west coast salmon you would say that total salmon harvests are generally increasing. But if you're a resident of Bella Bella or a DFO biologist, you would say that people are starving because the ecosystem that once made them commercial fishers and processors is wounded. If you're an economist, you would say that the Mifflin plan to reduce the fleet to increase the viability of the remaining operators was a perfectly rational response to a changing technology and market conditions. If, however, you were a resident of Ahousat, or maybe a lot of the people in this room, you would say that it's the elimination of half the jobs in your community.

Both versions of reality are of course correct, and the interpretation of that information again turns into politics.

The economists' view is that the management of the fishery and the cost of maintaining fishing people is in fact in excess in dollar terms of its value to Canada. The economists argue that when the fishing fleet is too large the marginal fishers should be eliminated, and hence the Davis plan and then the Mifflin plan and the placing of huge costs on the acquisition of a licence to go fishing.

The economists believe that technology is inevitable and it drives efficiency, and thus DFO targets fishermen for removal from the fleet rather than the killing power of the boats.

The economists believe that the marketplace is the best mechanism to decide which country should catch or then process fish, and thus we agree to the GATT rules that remove our very right to require that our fish are processed by our people.

The economists would say that catching fish for food doesn't pay. Canada might be better off if salmon came from farms in Chile, wild fish were caught by sports fishermen and any abundance was sold to the American commercial fishing interests for money to pay the fishermen to stay at home.

The economists have a plan that everyone here calls the two rivers policy. It assumes that B.C. needs a certain tonnage all right, but it costs too much money to manage those stocks on the 600 or so streams and rivers where they used to live, so we will concentrate our resources on the Skeena and on the Fraser—and we could lay off the biologists who used to walk the other 598 to manage fish.

• 1735

The histories of recent management in black cod, halibut and herring are all excellent examples of the economists' intervention into the historical allocation policies in British Columbia. The federal government has piloted quota fisheries and limited-entry fisheries in those species, and while individual incomes can be said to have increased, the numbers and distribution of jobs in our communities have been reduced significantly. By concentrating the access to the resource in the hands of fewer licence-holders, crew workers and communities have been cut out of the equation entirely.

But what is worse in these systems is that we've created a brand-new kind of fisherman called the armchair fisherman. Armchair fishermen don't work their privileged access to a public resource; rather, they speculate on it, rent it out to collect huge windfalls.

Many of these policies might even be okay to major fishing companies, who don't have an interest in whether fish are caught in rivers, inlets or at the mouth of the Fraser, or whose global interests aren't really affected much if those fish are then processed in Port Hardy, or in Bellingham, or in Vancouver.

If, on the other hand, you're a fishing family from Sointula or from Queen Charlotte City or from Bella Bella, centralization and consolidation of harvesting and processing and decision-making, and ultimately control, in ever-larger centres is literally the difference between the life and death of your community.

“Ah, come on, what's the problem, Corky?”, you might say. “Everything changes. Farming changes, logging changes, railroad towns change. Why should fishing be any different? You can't run a social fishery. Fishing, like everything else, has to be business. We must compete, so we must change”.

Firstly, let me say that if you were to ask me those questions, you would be right to do so. Everything does change, and fishing and governance are no different. We in British Columbia first had to change ourselves in order to have any place at all in this debate.

Let me go back to the beginning. In 1871 British Columbia signed on to an arrangement that gave fish to the federal government to manage, while the province managed literally every other natural resource. This model had been set in Confederation four years earlier, largely, I understand, to accommodate the need for an honest broker on the east coast to allocate stocks among individual Atlantic provinces that claimed the same fish.

On the west coast it made no sense to allocate fish to Ottawa, because there was only one government between Washington and Alaska. But we entered Confederation on the east coast model.

In 1992 I had the honour and the privilege to be invited to Newfoundland to study how the east coast fishery model was working there in that year. It was the time of the crashing of the cod stocks and politicians from around Canada were invited to attend a discussion in the legislature on the subject of this crisis. The speakers that day included politicians and union leaders and companies and scientists, and the atmosphere was surreal.

The city of St. John's was in shock. All the docks were full of tied-up fishing boats and no processing was happening. The local little theatre was running a play about unemployment and retraining of workers. It was indeed a comedy, but it was hard for us as outsiders to know when it was okay to laugh.

The discussion I attended in the legislature was about the crisis, but, more than that, it was about blame. Basically, all the speakers said yes, we knew it was coming, but it had always been coming and we were all caught up in blaming one another. Unions blamed companies and that got union leaders re-elected. Companies then blamed governments and that got the companies grants and concessions. The province blamed the feds and that always gave them an election issue, and the feds had control and that made people afraid to vote for anybody else for fear they would lose their share.

Folks, for many decades this same rhetorical device, this blaming, very much suited the interests of British Columbia politicians as well. It gave us the ability to dam the salmon rivers, dig up the spawning beds for road construction gravel, build cities on tributary streams, dredge harbours, placer mine wherever we chose and put human or industrial wastes into the rivers—because it didn't really matter what we did, because if it hurt fish it wasn't our responsibility, we could blame the federal government.

Fishermen in B.C. need to end some of the blaming, too. The “problem” in B.C. can't be blamed on fish farming or sports fishing or aboriginal allocations or “too many bureaucrats chasing too few fishermen”. Our problems in fact are too complex to put on any bumper sticker or any six-second clip or any campaign slogan. Neither do we, the provincial government, believe that we have an easy answer to what is to be done.

• 1740

British Columbians looked across the country at what eastern ministers taught me to call “a tragedy of biblical proportions” on the east coast, and what we saw was not unlike our own west coast experience with the Columbia River, once the greatest salmon river in the world and now barren with the legacy of 200-and-some dams and diversion projects, and we asked ourselves, is there another path? Can we do this differently?

We started that search for a different path with the knowledge that British Columbians believe fish are a common property resource. I am not being rhetorical. Every 12-year-old kid growing up in Castlegar and Terrace and North Vancouver believes they have a right to go fishing next summer and have at least the opportunity to catch a fish. Every commercial fisherman I know, every native fisherman, every conservationist, believes fish is a common property resource.

Some academics don't like that too much. From UBC to the special envoys Ruckelshaus and Strangway, they like to talk about “the tragedy of the commons”. They like to say that if people are allowed collective ownership of a renewable resource they will invariably screw it up. DFO history would suggest they don't like it much either. Their record shows they have consistently, through the years, moved the fishery away from the common property to private property.

The province recognizes that the tragedy of the commons is not just an academic's pipe dream. It can happen and it will happen in the absence of controls.

The federal government would like to use the marketplace as the control mechanism to avoid the tragedy. The province, at least under this administration, will never accede to that position.

If money and technology were the only control mechanisms which would function here, we would dam the rest of the rivers. That is the real economists' bottom line.

Criticism, however, is inadequate to the day. If the province does not accept the privatization of the fish and at the same time has an environmental or social or political or, dare I say it, even spiritual commitment to the survival of the stocks, then how would we propose to counter the centralization and marketplace models preferred by the economists at DFO?

The province believes it's possible to develop a community-based fishery that could, over time, reverse the downward drift of stocks, reverse the two-rivers policy, fight centralization in the fish harvesting and processing sectors, and allow citizens to tie the biological sustainability of fish stocks to the social and economic sustainability of the communities they live in.

The province believes it is possible to develop a community-based owner-operator fishery that might be the other path, and while we've been engaged in this debate, we've been ramping up our expenditures to try to get there: $23 million in habitat restoration in 1994-95, $38 million in 1995-96, $103 million in 1996-97, and $154 million last year. However, the collective resolve of a society is to be found in its actions, not in money. In 1992 we outlined dioxin from the pulp mills. In 1994 we started the watershed restoration program. In 1995 we killed Kemano II. In 1996 we took time out for an election, you guys. Then in 1997 we created the B.C. fisheries strategy, a co-management agreement with the federal government on salmon, and passed a fish protection act and a fisheries renewal act.

We believe we have set an example with the federal government with the ground fish fishery, where we gave 20% of the quota to communities and workers to leverage power to people where they live and the jobs they do, to begin to prove that a community-based and owner-operator fishery can be developed in this province. In a similar fashion we are hoping to negotiate agreements with the sport fishing industries and the fish farming industries so they also require a community component in the workforce.

Our vision of fishery renewal is headed in the same direction. We'll have as few government employees as possible and deliver all those programs with the people in the community. We have a chance here, folks.

We do not refute that there is the tragedy of the commons and that we need a brand new way to manage fish or fish will disappear. We reject, however, the economists' assertion that the only way to avoid it is to privatize the resource. In everything we do, from the behaviour of crown corporations to the legislation we pass to the way fishery renewal is structured, we will endeavour to fight the lust for the bottom line solutions and hatred of the principle of common property of the economist.

• 1745

We accept our responsibility to invent an alternative model and we invite the federal government, plead with you, to work with us to create a community-based owner-operator model or give us control of the fishery and the resources to manage it. Anything else is to repeat the Atlantic example, and we'll just blame one another while fish stocks and coastal communities die.

Thank you very much.

The Vice-Chairman (Mr. Gary Lunn): Thank you, Mr. Evans.

I have a list that takes us to 8.30 p.m. that is all organizations. I'm not going to make everyone here who also wants to speak wait until that time. I'm going to go through two or three fishermen and then I'm going to go through some organizations. So you may not follow the exact time. I'm going to follow this order, but I'm going to interject fishermen as we go along, only because in every community that we've been to we have got so much valuable information.

Having said that, I'm going to start with three fishermen. We'll start with Mr. Bob Rezansoff.

Mr. Bob Rezansoff (President, B.C. Vessel Owners Association): That's a tough act to follow, but I think if you look at the presentation that both ministers made, from the federal and the provincial governments, there are two visions of how the world will evolve.

In all of those problems that they described, in a way they are both right. It is because the resource is totally committed. There is no extra fish to go around.

I'm going to take a simpler tack. I don't like to speak from notes, but I have developed a head cold and it's very difficult for me to remember exactly what I was going to deal with.

When you go around the province, you are going to hear various management concerns, various allocation concerns, various community concerns. All of those concerns, if you examine them closely, revolve around the person's own ability to maintain his economic viability to, putting it bluntly, put bread on the table. That's where the rubber hits the road: putting bread on the table when they get home.

I'd like to discuss an issue that neither level of government has addressed. It's something that cuts across all of the different aspects, all of the different ways in which you see the world unfolding, whether you believe in the community concept of Mr. Evans or you believe in the market-driven approach of Mr. Anderson.

One issue we have that we don't get any meaningful input into is the aboriginal fishing strategy. That's a difficult position to take in a public forum, because immediately you are branded as a red-neck racist. I'd like to take an attempt at it.

The AFS in its inception is basically a federal fisheries policy initiative. Basically, it's a social policy. That's not to say that it is not a policy that should be discarded, but when it started in 1992 the industry was told that it was mandated by the Sparrow decision. The industry disputed that wholeheartedly. Recent court decisions have proven us right, that it wasn't mandated by Sparrow. It's basically a social policy initiative. In good measure, especially on the Fraser River, it has destabilized the industry; it has led to uncertainty.

When we were doing the round table, what was the main thrust of what came out of the round table? Nobody wanted to go and do the unpopular things: buying the fleet down, things that were going to impact on the communities that Mr. Evans discussed, all of those things that have an impact on individuals as people. Everyone who was there knew that they were going to have those impacts and at the end of the day give that fish away to somebody else. In good measure, that's what's happening.

I think—and it is my personal opinion—that 1992 was the brood stock year for 1996. I can remember distinctly poking Minister Crosbie in the chest, and Minister Siddon—I don't know in what order—and asking them what I would be doing in 1996. Will I be working in 1996? I put it to them, I know I will be out of work in 1996; I know that for a fact; I'm not going fishing in 1996 because of what you precipitated here under the guise of a social policy.

They all said that this wasn't a problem and that everything was going to be fine. I wish I could get in front of them and say I told you so.

• 1750

I think that led in good measure to the implementation or at least the thrust that led to the Mifflin plan. I'm not saying those were all the reasons. There were lots of other worldwide reasons market-wise, but it was a major factor—the fact that in 1996 we were going to have one of our major systems with no stocks.

The point I'd like to make is that both levels of government are strangely silent on this issue. It's not discussed. Neither side here today made mention of the fact that this exists or its effect on our economic survivability. We've done all the things Mr. Anderson suggested we do. We're almost at 50%. That has been extremely painful. What you'll hear when you go around the coast in the communities is how painful that has been and how expensive it's been and how difficult it's been to adjust yourself to that reality. But we don't get to discuss this issue.

Right now we have a process going on with Judge Sam Toy, which led from the Dr. May process. How do we compensate for these gratuitous transfers, such as AFS? I'm participating in those and I'm doing it under protest, not because I believe in what we're doing there, but I'm scared shitless that if we don't design a mechanism, at the end of the day it's going to mean that half of the guys in this room are going to be gone; if we don't put those mechanisms in place, we'll end up five or six years down the road and all that fish will be gone on a social policy initiative and we'll have nothing. All our investments will be worth zero. I'm there, and I'm struggling with the concept.

I think the question I'd like to ask you is, who speaks for the guys in this room? When we went to the Toy process to discuss this issue of compensation—and it's not compensation, it's a buyout—the aboriginal sector walked out of the room. They said they would only discuss things government to government and that our ability to have input into that was with our government, with the federal government, and with you people. I don't see any point where we can have that input. I don't see the federal government asking for our input into that thing. Neither do I see that coming from the provincial government. Who speaks for the people in this room with respect to that issue? That's going to be the biggest single issue that's coming down the road. It's going to dwarf the Mifflin plan.

When we finish settling land claims and treaties—and I understand that that has to go on, and I understand there are reasons, and I'm not disputing any of that. I'm saying that the people in this room have had no ability to put their concerns forward. There's a social policy in place to provide economic initiatives and economic opportunity for a group of people, but in a totally committed resource like we have here, if you provide economic opportunity for one group of people, of necessity it has to come from the other group of people. This is the group of people it's coming from. This is the group of people giving up their income to provide a government social initiative that may be acceptable. Maybe it's the way we should go, but in the meantime these people have no voice. Not only do they have no voice, but I take it that both levels of government are almost at war with their own constituents.

When we go to court, which is the suggestion of the Sparrow decision—go to court and thrash out the commercial issues, and we've done that—what does Mr. Anderson's government do? They proceed to put in Bill C-62 and change the whole thread of how we approach fisheries. Mr. Evans said common property fisheries. That's right. That goes right back to the Magna Carta. It's over a thousand years old. What does the federal government propose to do? They propose to change that whole approach. They propose to be able to make private deals and to reallocate fish stocks. They propose to legalize what they haven't been able to do under the present legislation. I think that's wrong. I'd like to know who speaks for these people. Who speaks for the fishermen in this regard, and where do we have our input into this? I don't see it. I don't see it anywhere.

With the Toy process, designing what amounts to a buyout—not compensation but a simple buyout. As I said, at the end of that process half of these people could be gone. The industry could collapse on itself because it doesn't have sufficient stocks to maintain itself.

• 1755

We're told that even if we do reach a consensus on the mechanical aspect of it, or even if we do put measures forward to Judge Toy that are acceptable because the aboriginal sector walked out of the room, it's not really a consensus. I can tell you that since 1992, on the aboriginal fisheries strategy, we've met in private with the aboriginal sector. Mr. Brown, who is an adviser to the provincial government, I myself, and Mr. Fowler met on two or three occasions as early as mid-1992 to see if we could resolve this issue. We spent $300,000 of the federal government's money with a professional facilitator to see if we could mediate the situation; and we could not.

The question I ask of you again is where does our importance to our communities get factored into this? Who is it considered by? Where do we get really meaningful input into the effect AFS is going to have on us? How do we get our voices heard on what this is?

If you want social and economic opportunity for the aboriginal sector, and I don't dispute that it's a worthy objective, I think the people you are taking it away from, at the very least, for God's sake, deserve a voice in that thing. We are being led to the slaughter, as it were, and we're not even having our concerns discussed.

When you examine AFS, I think you have to consider whether it has met its objectives. Is it accountable? In the last couple of years we go out and we pay exorbitant licence fees. That fishery is granted an extra fishery to pay its costs.

It's a different approach. The implications of it have not been investigated. The implications of it are equally grave as the Mifflin plan. I would urge you to take into consideration the things I have said.

That's a policy issue. On a mechanical issue, just a straight simple thing I think you could press the government on too, everybody in this room is paying exorbitant licence fees. Those licence fees were predicated on a 1991-94 base period, and incomes, as Mr. Anderson said, that were three times higher than they are now, to recover 3% to 5% of our gross incomes. We are not making that kind of money now. We're making two-thirds less. But we're paying as if we were still making that kind of money and still had that kind of resource coming to us.

So something that is deliverable to us really quickly and both levels of government should look at is at least some relief on the licensing scheduling before this year's salmon licence fees come up—and all licence fees, not just salmon. I understand a review is going on, but if you have any input into that thing, that is something my members would really appreciate.

The Vice-Chairman (Mr. Gary Lunn): I'm going to go back to the witness list for one speaker. I'm going to call on Mr. John Van Dongen. He is the official opposition critic.

Mr. John Van Dongen (Opposition Fisheries Critic, Legislative Assembly of British Columbia): Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I appreciate the opportunity to comment today.

I want to focus on three issues, the first one being the aboriginal fisheries strategy, which continues to foster tension and uncertainty in the commercial fishing sector. It is a program that is patently wrong, because it is contrary to the principles of equality and equity between people. It sets up a racially based division in the commercial sector, which is inevitably divisive.

I am disappointed to see that both our provincial and federal governments cannot see the serious disservice the aboriginal fisheries strategy is doing to native and non-native people alike.

A second issue I want to comment on is the improper taking of private property rights by DFO. I am going to use one specific example from the lower mainland of British Columbia, but this applies in a lot of other areas. This issue involves the cleaning of ditches in the flood plain areas of the lower mainland and other parts of British Columbia, which is absolutely essential for viable land-based farming to survive.

This past summer the City of Abbotsford and other local governments were confronted with a new five-page agreement of detailed requirements by DFO before they would authorize ditch cleaning for the coming season. The proposed authorization included a long list of specifications by DFO that add significantly to the cost of cleaning these ditches. These are additional costs, which financially stressed farmers and governments cannot afford.

• 1800

The authorization contract included certain compensation measures that have a direct impact on private property rights and farmers' ability to farm their land to its full potential. The whole exercise demands an answer to the question, compensation for what?

The issue of improper taking by DFO of private property rights gets worse in other parts of the Fraser Valley. There are farmers in the Langley-Aldergrove area who are expected by DFO to give up the use of large areas of land because DFO demands it for wetland habitat. For example, in one case five acres and in another case sixteen acres are being taken, in effect expropriated, without a hint of compensation other than more rules.

The third issue I want to raise is an example of serious habitat damage on the Chilliwack River and no action by DFO.

The Chilliwack River is a scenic tributary of the Fraser and Vedder Rivers, an extremely popular and important watercourse for fish and fishermen. The Chilliwack River runs through the centre of a narrow valley bounded on both sides by deep banks of fine particle silty clay. At various times and places the river has cut into these banks, causing severe erosion and large clumps of clay to fall into the water. The most recent occurrences were in January 1997 and two weeks ago in January 1998.

The January 1997 slide at Slesse Park was the subject of a massive lobbying effort by fishermen from all over the lower mainland. In the final analysis, nothing was actually done that would mitigate the habitat damage for fish.

Yes, there were two studies, one of which was suppressed by the provincial ministry of forests. DFO, with the supposed co-operation from the Minister of the Environment, did some sampling of the river to determine the impacts. But we have never been given the results of the testing in writing and, to the best of my knowledge, the minister has never had an official report.

The most recent slide occurred on private land. The owner appears to be capable and willing of doing proper mitigation work, but, judging from previous approaches to the fishery authorities, he will not get the slightest co-operation without expensive engineering studies and endless bureaucracy.

The guiding principle of the Minister of the Environment and DFO is that we should let nature take its course. This is simply an excuse to do nothing.

The two senior governments are not willing to do anything themselves on these issues but dictate to the little guys, local governments and farmers. They run up costs of ditch maintenance but don't bring any cash. They talk about protection of fish and fish habitat but refuse to do anything on the Chilliwack River and in other situations.

I want to close with four points about what I think is required. What is required is a lot more consistency between what governments say and what they do when it comes to protecting fish habitat. What is required is for governments to quit unilaterally dumping responsibilities on local governments and innocent third parties. What is required are governments that fully respect private property rights, including the right of farmers for proper drainage. Finally, what is required are governments who will pursue true equity between all commercial fishermen rather than support racially based divisions that lead to uncertainty and mistrust.

Thank you very much for the opportunity.

The Vice-Chairman (Mr. Gary Lunn): Thank you very much.

I'm now going to go back to a fisherman. You've already heard from him briefly to welcome us, but he is on our list. Mr. John Cummins is a commercial fisherman. I ask him to come up and make a brief presentation.

Mr. John Cummins: In my welcoming remarks I noted that the average Fraser gillnetter caught only 2,100 sockeye this year, worth about $13,000. Those are simple facts to determine. All you've got to do is look at the catch statistics—and I believe Mr. Eidsvik has passed a sheet of paper around—multiply it by five and a half pounds or so for fish weight and multiply by the number of licences and you've got the number. It's not rocket science.

• 1805

The government reallocated to the native fishery what worked out to about 1,500 fish per boat, worth about $10,000. That's what the AFS has done to the people in this room. Yes, the prices are down, as the minister indicated, but so is access to resource; it's down by about 40%.

Let me tell you how irrational this is. And let's not forget that the Supreme Court ruled against any special rights for this group of people. But let's look at how irrational this is.

About two years ago now, the government oversaw the spending of $80 million in a buy-back. Most of that money was put forward by the fleet. Where are those boats now? Well, I'll tell you where they are. Most of those boats, or a lot of those boats, are now participating in this exclusive native fishery. So instead of fishing with the commercial fleet on Tuesday, those boats are now in there on Monday and maybe even Saturday.

So how many boats, what boats, who fishes? Who knows? Unbelievably, these matters are beyond DFO authority. The bands themselves determine how many boats will fish, how many set nets will be put in place, and who will fish.

Mr. Chairman, you or I could be designated to participate in one of those native commercial fisheries. So could an Australian or an Alaskan. It matters not a whit. This is not a right. The fishery, Mr. Chairman, must end before the fish are gone and before we lose our future.

I can't let this opportunity go by without discussing the minister's performance in Prince Rupert. I got a call on the Friday night when that event was happening, shortly after an American packer rammed a gillnet boat from the harbour down here. I was on the phone all that evening. The next morning I was advised of the blockade shortly after it happened. Our van was packed at home to go on a family vacation. I made a choice. I got on the next plane to Prince Rupert and I tried to help solve the problem. I worked with a number of people in this room and others to try to help solve that problem.

It took the minister four days to get there. He made a choice. His choice was to stay with some Liberal bag men, I guess, in Newfoundland, rather than come out and try to settle this major international incident. And since then, who has he tried to blame but the fishermen who were trying to protect the Canadian resource.

There is another issue that is a big concern to me, and it's one that hasn't made much headway in the press. We haven't been able to get too far with it. One reason may be, as it was reported in the Vancouver Sun a while ago, that the particular organization in question spends about $4 million a year in advertising. But in the summer of 1995, several sport fishing lodges on the central coast refused to provide the fisheries department with adequate catch statistics, as required by law. Eventually, charges were laid against three lodges, including two facilities owned by Oak Bay Marine Group.

Now a year later the charges against Oak Bay were dropped, because the department discovered that the Oak Bay lodges were actually providing the information to the registered lobbyist, the Sport Fishing Institute. The lobbyist apparently provided the department with the statistics in November. Now what good statistics received in November are to manage a fishery in August, I don't know. But why were those charges dropped? Why were the charges dropped just days after the minister went sport fishing on the central coast with the principal of the Oak Bay Marine Group? I don't know.

This trip was organized in part by Velma McColl, the former executive director of the Sport Fishing Institute and now the minister's eyes and ears on the west coast.

Why were the charges dropped when Oak Bay Marine Group president Bob Wright was quoted in the Vancouver Sun as saying that he didn't provide the catch statistics because the department would have closed them down if they had known what he was catching? I don't know.

Compare that treatment to the treatment of Ray Forest. Ray is a gillnetter from just up the river here. We had a protest going last summer, and just days ago the federal fisheries minister decided to lay criminal charges against Ray for his participation in that protest. It took them almost a year—well, since last summer, six or seven months now—to lay criminal charges for participation in the protest.

I think this committee must look at the way the department handles its prosecutions and how it deals with these matters of enforcement that are before it.

• 1810

I'd like to mention habitat as well. Some conclude that both these ministers, Mr. Anderson and Mr. Evans, are real environmentalists. But I'd like the committee to examine how it was that the Vancouver Island Highway, which crosses about 30 coho-producing streams on Vancouver Island, proceeded without the benefit of an environmental assessment. Both the province and the federal government turned themselves inside out to avoid environmental assessments.

If DFO had acknowledged the obvious alteration to habitat on the stream crossings, it would have triggered an environmental assessment. The province was required to undertake an assessment of any highway project over 20 kilometres. They ensured that the road contracts were under 20 kilometres and thus avoided a provincial assessment.

I think this committee should look at what went on in that highway and DFO's actions in not triggering an assessment. Those are coho-producing streams, and in a matter of a couple of years, when the coho aren't returning to those streams, you know who's going to get blamed: it's going to be the commercial industry for overfishing in Johnstone Strait. That's not the problem. The problem is habitat desecration, and it was sanctioned by both the federal and provincial governments.

The last item I want to raise, Mr. Chairman, and it probably should have been the first, is the most outrageous sleight of hand since Bingogate. It's worthy of Brian Mulroney, but then Glen Clark has generally made Brian Mulroney look like the truth fairy. I'm talking about the Kemano completion project.

In April of 1997 Alcan sued the Government of British Columbia over the 1995 cancellation of Alcan's Kemano completion project, a project destined to divert about 80% of B.C.'s Nechako River, essentially swapping wild salmon for electricity that Alcan could sell to the U.S. via B.C. Hydro. When Alcan sued, Premier Clark thundered, and I quote, “British Columbians won't tolerate several hundred million in compensation to a company which was pursuing a project which was uneconomic and environmentally unsound.”

Four months later Mr. Clark quietly handed the Nechako and all its salmon to Alcan. Yet he claimed that Alcan would withdraw its lawsuit, Kitimat would get 2,000 new jobs, the evil Kemano completion project was dead, and the water and wild salmon of the Nechako had been saved. Only the first statement is true: Alcan has withdrawn its lawsuit. The rest is nonsense.

What is the committee's interest in this besides protecting fish? Well, when talking about Kemano, you must not forget that pressure was exerted on federal fisheries scientists to change their testimony and support Alcan back in mid-1980s. That's the fact of the matter. It's well documented that the federal fisheries department put pressure on their scientists to change their testimony and fisheries scientists resigned over it. In fact, those who wouldn't were not allowed into the room when the final deal was made.

You can't remove 70% or 80% of the water from the third largest tributary of the Fraser River and expect to maintain salmon runs. That's just a fact.

Mr. Chairman, DFO is a rogue department. It's a complex department, and it deserves more than a minister coming in and taking the department over for a couple of years and then moving on. It's a department that requires some commitment. Yet it's a tragedy that our political system doesn't allow, it seems, for experienced people to get in place to manage that department.

The end result of it all is that there are good people in this room who are going to lose jobs, lose their livelihood, and maybe lose more than just that. Because if you've only taken in $13,000 and you've got a boat that probably cost close to $100,000 to build and you've got mortgages and kids at school and to feed and all those sorts of things, you need access to that resource and you need a resource that's well managed. That hasn't happened. It's easy to document.

I urge you to examine some of these issues I've mentioned.

Thank you very much.

Voices: Hear, hear!

• 1815

The Vice-Chairman (Mr. Gary Lunn): I would now like to call on Mike Hunter, from the Fisheries Council of British Columbia.

Mr. Mike Hunter (President, Fisheries Council of British Columbia): Mr. Chairman, I will try to be brief. I notice the politicians get more than five minutes, but is it just that my watch is wrong?

I'm president of the Fisheries Council of B.C., which represents the major fish processing industry in British Columbia.

I'll give you just a bit of background, Mr. Chairman and members. In 1997 the companies I represent purchased about two-thirds of the salmon harvested in British Columbia and transformed that product into usable food. British Columbia is like the rest of the world. When you process a fish, it's worth about double what it's worth at the dock.

The other point you should understand is that the fortunes of harvesters and the fortunes of other people in the business, processors and marketers, are very closely intertwined. The moment you start to separate out the fortunes and think you can deal with harvesters without dealing with processors, we believe you start to make mistakes.

The commercial fishing industry in British Columbia, despite difficulties in salmon, which I want to talk about a little, is still worth about $1 billion a year. We are still approximately one-third of the Canadian total. Of that, salmon represents about a third of the value.

It is important to our export trade and it is important to jobs. In 1997 our member companies provided jobs for 3,000 people. It has been higher than that, but the industry is in economic difficulty. There can be no denying that. Everyone will agree.

Why is the industry in difficulty? Well, it's not because people are stupid; and I don't subscribe to the hypothesis that it's because DFO has a sinister agenda—not at all. The problem is outside our control. The problem is that we don't have a protected industry any more. We're part of the global economy, thanks to GATT, NAFTA, and other things out of our control. But perhaps more important, and most important, is that salmon is no longer a specialty product.

Since 1984 the production of salmon around the world has increased almost threefold. It has increased in the North Pacific, from British Columbia for a while, from Alaska, from Russia, from Japan. But in 1997 for the first time farmed salmon exceeded global production of wild salmon and now represents about 55% of the total.

So the world of salmon has changed. Your economics training from wherever you went to school will tell that in that kind of circumstance, where supply is rising faster than consumption, the price is going to decline. That is outside the control of British Columbia companies.

British Columbia now produces about 2.5% of the world's supply of salmon. We do not control the price paid by Japanese buyers in Tokyo. We do not control the price paid by canned salmon buyers in Liverpool, London, or Sydney.

What does that mean to us? It means the economics of this business have to change. The simple arithmetic is that if you look from a salmon fisherman or salmon processor's point of view, if you look at the gross revenues achievable at current world prices, there simply is not enough money in the system to pay adequate returns to capital and to labour and to provide a return to the public of Canada, which owns the resource.

From our perspective, we have a business which is high volume, short season, with a highly perishable raw material. We have to be globally competitive. Salmon is a major part of that. We need a secure and consistent supply of raw material. We have very much an interest in the points Mr. Rezansoff and Mr. Cummins have raised about that supply of raw material. We have an interest in and participate in the management of the fishery, alongside many people in this room, through the various advisory groups the Department of Fisheries maintains.

We need fishery management plans that allow an optimum utilization of the harvest. We must move away from delivering all the fish on one day a week. We need the opportunity to be able to move fish into different markets.

How are we going to do this? Well, we think the Mifflin plan was a good start in getting some economic sense and economic viability back into the fishery. I regret to say that we think at this point the Mifflin plan doesn't go far enough; fleet reduction has to go further. Our industry has reduced in size significantly over the last eight years. We think the harvesting sector, because of the inter-linkages, unfortunately but inevitably has to get smaller, unless governments make a choice, as Mr. Evans suggested, that there's going to be some public involvement in the fishery and some public funding support for communities that to this point in our history have depended on it.

• 1820

In this industry we need predictable and equitable legislative and regulatory frameworks. We need clear government policy to conserve the resource and to facilitate economic efficiency and the market-driven goals which we believe in the final analysis must dictate the way this industry goes.

We are not going to see the answers to our problems come from higher prices for product. The fact is that, as I've said, salmon supplies are increasing. The herring resource in British Columbia, which has provided a cross-subsidy to many fishermen and processes over the last 10 years, is in difficulty in the Japanese market, which is the only place this product can be sold. The Asian economies, which have been looked to as an area for diversification of markets, I don't think I have to tell you about.

The costs of production for farmed salmon will be the primary determinants of price for both farmed and wild salmon; and we believe production costs for farmed salmon will continue to decline. You can do the math yourself and figure out what it needs to make this industry economically viable—and by that I mean a decent, not exorbitant but decent, return to both capital and labour inputs—and to provide a return to the public of Canada.

This industry has survived incredible circumstances in recent years: almost a tripling of world salmon supply, tremendous fluctuations in catch volumes, the decreasing price of products, the shrinkage of traditional markets because of the advent of farmed salmon, increasing costs, which have to do with federal, provincial, and municipal governments. The collapse of the Soviet Union is not an insignificant factor, because the Soviet Union has now become a supplier of salmon to the Japanese market.

Mr. Chairman, I could go on for a long time. I don't want to do that. Our basic message to you is that we believe governments have a very clear choice in restoring this industry to what it can be as a provider of income in British Columbia. The choice is very stark. Either you allow the number of people in the fishery to decline and have economics rule or you have a social fishery which provides public subsidies. We don't think that's the right model. We don't think that's the way to attract investment into the business. It's a tough message, but it's one we nevertheless firmly believe in.

Thank you very much.

The Vice-Chairman (Mr. Gary Lunn): Thank you very much, Mr. Hunter.

I call on David Ellis.

Mr. David Ellis (President, David Ellis and Associates Ltd.): Thank you, honourable members. It's an honour to be able to speak before you today as you tour around British Columbia, meeting all the people involved in this diverse industry.

I've prepared quite a long brief. I'm sorry about that, but I got going and I have something I wanted to say, as I do once in a while.

I'm a consultant to the industry. I work mostly with the smaller people in the industry: aboriginal groups, environmental groups, many fishermen's groups over the years, and I have over time got to know many people throughout the industry. What I want to say today and what I've tried to put in writing is the truth about what is really going on: where this wealth is really going and how much wealth is really there—and much more than that, what the potential is if we work with the fish, if we build this industry. I agree completely with Mr. Corky Evans that this industry can at least double in size—I think he alluded to that—if we work with biological principles. Our very skilled Department of Fisheries and Oceans people have the skills to manage this thing to increase the runs, but it's not happening now, for a number of reasons.

I want to get right to the core and the quick of the problem immediately. This is something you won't often hear in meetings like this among fishermen's meetings anywhere.

The core of the problem is corporate concentration in this industry. I've tried to lay out in as clear and simple a fashion as I can how the corporate interests, largely the corporate interests of George Weston Limited, quite completely control the department and every aspect of policy-making and research within the department. As long as this continues, the resource rents are confiscated by those individuals within the department who used to work for these very large corporations and people will never receive the benefits of this industry.

• 1825

This industry is dying because of corporate concentration. I have tried to lay out the functions of that and how that has affected the industry.

The two main corporate fisheries of interest are sockeye salmon and herring. Both those fisheries, there is abundant biological proof, are seriously overfished in this day. Both of them have huge potentials, but both of them are extremely depressed because of continued poor fisheries management. I have laid out that in the brief.

I'm also going to mention the fish farming industry, in which that company, George Weston Limited, is now investing in a big way in British Columbia. They have some of the very largest farms, which are four times the size of the average farm in Norway. This is completely contrary to the principles of the wild fishery. The research the Pacific Biological Station and the West Van station are putting into this research comes away from what could be spent on rebuilding the wild fishery and its many diverse participants.

I'm saying it right flat out here. I've recently written a work for the David Suzuki Foundation on the fish farming industry. That is a completely inappropriate activity for British Columbia. We should close down all our fish farms immediately here. This is not the right thing. It will lead to the end of our wild fish. There is abundant evidence. If you want to talk to the top people in the field you will find there is abundant evidence.

In Norway they are now realizing they are going to lose all their wild fish. The reasons for that are complex, but I have some copies of my report here. It gets into the details of salmon farming.

I have also made some recommendations here. The two I will leave with you and I feel most strongly about are concerned with the owner-operator policy Mr. Corky Evans talked about, which is in place now. We have to have a return to owner-operator small community vessels in the commercial fishery. Right now we don't. We have an increasing concentration, and the Mifflin plan made it worse.

The Mifflin plan put the little guy out of business and made the big guy richer. It was basically like handing $7 million or $8 million, mostly to Galen Weston and his shareholders. That is what the Mifflin plan was really about. It was not the satisfactory answer to where we should go.

So the first thing I would like to say is owner-operator. Second to that is that the big processors should stick to processing, not boats. What is happening now is that the guy who has the most money to build the fastest and best boat of any kind is the processor. So they are building the high-capacity boats which can catch more than anybody else.

It also depends on the fisherman. That is a big part of it too. But the ability to access capital to buy licences and to build better equipment leaves the little guy behind.

The guys who lost out were people I know through the communities. I was a commercial troller myself for 12 years, a small boat fisherman in the Queen Charlotte Islands. That was one of the best parts of my life. I loved every minute of it. That fishery is basically an uneconomic fishery, the one I was in. I worked my way out of it and went back to school and did the whole thing.

I would like to retire to that some day. I would love, when I am older, to buy a little troller and get out there with the guys. You can't do that any more. There are no more little trollers. With this Mifflin plan they have eliminated the littlest boats. They have been combined with the biggest ones. I'm going to buy a big one anyway, I think, and make it a little one, just for the heck of it.

The last thing I want to say is about the Department of Fisheries and how the department operates. I have a lot of respect for a lot of the people in the department. I have got to know them as I have been consulting in the different communities. There is a huge amount of ability there. There is also a huge core of corruption. This has occurred over time. Many people who work for the department, I believe, don't talk to the fishermen on an everyday basis but talk to the fish processors.

I have a large amount of correspondence, which I obtained through the Access to Information Act. I know what I'm talking about in this brief. I can back up everything I say in there.

• 1830

What we're seeing is a development of policy for corporations, and we have to change that. One of the problems also within the department is there is a lack of accountability. There are good people. And in the province, too, especially in the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food, there is a large core of people who are working with industry—not with the public interests but with industry. I'm appalled by this. It just rots my socks, to put it in graphic language.

I think we have to introduce an accountability clause within the DFO. In other words, if they're going to retire and do all this work, they had better work for the fish and the public interest, and if they don't do that, they don't get a pension. We have to somehow link their pensions with the Public Service Commission with their performance. When I was a fisherman, if I didn't come in with a load of chinook, coho, or whatever I was fishing, I didn't make it. I had to produce, and I did. I loved it and I did well at it. The same thing with people in the bureaucracy.

Now if they want to get in there and develop a corrupt relationship, which I've documented here has occurred with National Sea Products and Fishery Products International and here with the fishery association, they have to be accountable for the decisions that lead to the decline of our stocks.

Thank you very much.

Voices: Hear, hear!

The Vice-Chairman (Mr. Gary Lunn): Thank you very much, Mr. Ellis.

I'm now going to go to the floor and I'm going to call on a fisherman before I go back to the list: Mr. Phil Eidsvik. If you keep your comments to five minutes or so, it would be much appreciated.

Mr. Phil Eidsvik (Individual Presentation): If you wouldn't mind warning me when I hit four with a high sign, I'll be out of here in five.

The Vice-Chairman (Mr. Gary Lunn): I'll do that, no problem.

Mr. Phil Eidsvik: I didn't know I was going to get called, but I did bring a few notes. I hope you'll have a chance to look at them.

First of all, I'm bringing a paper from an aboriginal elder from the Skeena River system, who asked me to present a paper on her behalf. I'll just leave it with you. Her big concern is the aboriginal fisheries strategy. She says it has impacted badly on the Skeena River system. She says she and many other elders can no longer get their food fish, and she asked me to bring this to your attention in the hope that you guys will do something about the AFS.

What I want to talk very briefly about is the system in DFO, and you guys have done some good work on it, for the muzzling of scientists. In B.C. the problem is much, much worse. We've not only had scientists muzzled, we've had deliberate, malicious, evil, public misinformation campaigns by the Department of Fisheries. We've had fisheries bureaucrats come to this committee and deliberately lie. I want to talk very briefly about it, because if you don't clean the bad guys out of DFO, the guys who will lie to you, who will lie to Canadians, I don't think there's any hope for the fishery. I'll give you one example.

When we were before this committee in 1992—it was in the aftermath of the great spawning tragedy that resulted from the aboriginal fisheries strategy—the committee chair put it to the deputy minister and one of his assistants, the regional director general here: “Did you give orders not to charge aboriginal people with offences in 1992”? The deputy minister and the regional director general sitting beside him said, “Of course not. We didn't give those orders.” I have to say it just like that.

Six months after the committee hearings, through access to information, we get some documents. This is a memo from Pat Chamut, who was one person at the meeting. He says “I spoke to Bruce Rawson”, who is a deputy minister, and it says “Sale of small amounts of personally caught food fish should not be prosecuted”. So we had a deputy minister tell you he never gave that order, and here we have the memo, dated August 28.

And it gets worse. Here is another memo we obtained through a leak in DFO, dated October 14, 1992, six weeks before these two individuals appeared before your committee to tell you they never gave such orders. This is a memo where they're discussing with the Sto:lo outstanding fisheries charges. DFO, in the persons of Rawson and Chamut, agree to consult the Department of Justice to get the charges dropped against people who were charged in 1992. So not only did they give orders not to charge anybody, but they went around the back of the committee and tried to get the charges dropped for the people who were charged.

• 1835

That comes to the credibility of the department. I think unless you deal with those issues.... Mr. Chamut has since been promoted to assistant deputy minister status in Ottawa and is a disappointment to everybody in this room. I don't think there's anyone in this room who, in their dealings with Mr. Chamut, will say that he's an honourable, truthful man. It distresses me to come here and say that today, but the evidence is before you.

Mr. Anderson came in today and said the Mifflin plan has reduced the commercial fishing fleet by 30%, I think he said, or 40%. Since 1992 we've had 1,500 new commercial fishing licences issued on the Fraser River—1,500. The native-only commercial fishery on the Fraser River is now twice the size of the regular comercial fishing fleet on the Fraser River.

So if the officials in the Department of Fisheries won't come to you as a committee and as our representatives in Parliament and tell you the truth, what hope is there for us to present our stuff?

Finally, in closing about the aboriginal fishery strategy, in the past five years many of us have been called racists for opposing it. We've been called all sorts of bad things. Every time I get asked that question I put the question back to the questioner; I say “How would you like it if you showed up for work today and were told that you couldn't go to work because some bureaucrat in Ottawa had determined that your parents were the wrong ethnic ancestry?” I've always believed that every Canadian has an equal opportunity to go fishing commercially. The Supreme Court of Canada said it in the Gladstone case. They said when it's commercial fishing all Canadians have an equal right. We believe that our aboriginal brothers and sisters and everybody else in this room needs an equal opportunity. The AFS has not given that.

I ask you, when you go back and debate the content of your report, ask yourself if you could possibly withstand going to work on Monday morning and being told, “No, you're the wrong race. If you go to work today we're going to prosecute you, we're going to throw you in jail.” And John Cummins knows about that; he spent two days in jail. “And if you keep doing it, we're going to take away your fishing licence and your tools to make a living.” We think it's unacceptable. In Canada we believe in commercial fishing. Everybody should be equal.

Thank you.

Voices: Hear, hear!

The Vice-Chairman (Mr. Gary Lunn): Thank you, Mr. Eidsvik. I couldn't agree with some of your comments about the scientists. We've been pursuing that very heavily, the whole committee has, over the last session.

We're now going to go to Jamie Austin from the Underwater Harvesters Association.

Mr. Andrew Milne (Past President, Underwater Harvesters Association): Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I should say to begin with that I'm not Jamie Austin. He couldn't be here today. I'm Andrew Milne, the past president of the association.

We appreciate the opportunity to bring you some comments from a different fishery, another industry. At a time when there are serious changes and problems in B.C.'s major fisheries and when the DFO is subjected to a barrage of criticism for almost everything they do, it's easy to overlook the fact that there are a number of healthy, well-managed fisheries in B.C. and that the DFO deserves some credit for its foresight and constructive approach. There's another side to the picture.

Our organization, the Underwater Harvesters Association, represents licence holders and others in the goeyduc fishery. Although we're not widely known, our industry is the largest shellfishery in Canada and the fourth-largest fishery, after salmon, herring, and halibut, in B.C. The positive development of our industry and others, including sablefish, halibut, prawns, and rockfish, to a large extent is the result of a progressive and cooperative approach taken by the local DFO officials here.

In the last ten years or so we've learned through experience of the profound effects good management can have on our markets. Controlling our output to ensure a steady flow of high-quality seafood products has changed the whole nature of our industries. Being able to supply live and fresh products daily has opened markets unknown in the past. This has been possible through joint management with the DFO and the fishermen.

The Vice-Chairman (Mr. Gary Lunn): One moment. Could I ask the people to try to keep their chatter down a little bit. It's difficult to hear. Thank you.

• 1840

Mr. Andrew Milne: The role of DFO has changed. Much of the day-to-day operation of our fishery is now done and paid for by the industry. In other areas, DFO authority is more important than ever. These areas include conservation, health, licensing, and enforcement. The ultimate authority in these areas must remain with the DFO, and we would ask you to give them increased support.

Recently there has been talk of lower levels of government getting involved in fisheries management, a suggestion that we believe should be considered with great caution. The consultative process should not be confused with the ultimate authority. Other jurisdictions, that is, the United States, have scattered authorities in fisheries matters, and we know that can result in confusion and sometimes chaos. We don't believe Canada has anything to learn from the U.S. in this matter.

We can always improve our own procedures, however. An example of this is the proposal for the creation of marine protected areas, MPAs. This is a subject of great interest to people in our industries. It could have a profound effect on many seafood industries. The scope of the proposals could cover any part of the coast and limit use of any area for any purpose. Some wish to prevent all activities in some areas; others suggest more limited restrictions to facilitate research and conservation. Our industry does not oppose MPAs in principle, but we're naturally concerned about the effect they could have on our harvest.

In many cases, we believe MPAs could co-exist with carefully and conservatively managed fisheries such as ours. Full consultation with everyone involved is the key to success with this problem. Some self-appointed proponents of MPAs have been hostile to industries concerned or have given them short shrift. However, under DFO we now have assurance from the director general that our concerns will be fully met and taken into account before MPAs are established. Only with the lead of DFO can we be assured that matters of this kind can be fairly dealt with.

The fundamental roles of DFO, I mentioned before, deserve your increased support. As many things change in our business, these subjects become more important than ever:

1. Conservation. Assessment of the size of the resource and the setting of overall sustainable quotas is basic to all management. Industry can help in surveying an assessment as we do and needs to be consulted regularly in the setting of quotas, but the final authority must remain with DFO.

2. Health. The quality of Canadian seafood is assured by our inspection procedures, which are internationally recognized. Unsafe shellfish can cause sickness or worse. While this again is an area for cooperation, only the Government of Canada has the authority and prestige to maintain the highest standards.

3. Licensing. The foundation of a successful management regime is a clear and stable licensing plan. Those licensed to operate in an industry have a privilege and increasingly a responsibility to look after the industry's welfare. As fishermen make commitments to improve their industry's future prospects, only the federal government can ensure security in the long term.

4. Enforcement. The best management and conservation plans are useless without steady enforcement. In recent DFO reorganizations, many of us believe, enforcement has not had the emphasis it needs. In our case, we are hiring private detectives to help DFO catch poachers and others breaking fisheries regulations. Though the cooperation between our people and DFO officials has been helpful, more DFO enforcement is needed. We ask you to give them support to restore their capacity in this important job.

In the last ten or fifteen years there has been a lot of development in the non-traditional fisheries in B.C. Fishermen themselves started it, but it requires vision and cooperation on the part of local DFO officials to make it happen. Perhaps some of the lessons learned may be helpful in the future of our traditional fisheries, but that is up to them to determine. What we know is that we have seen DFO develop some of the best managed fisheries to be found anywhere, and they've done it here in B.C.

To the public, fisheries issues seem sometimes so complicated and difficult as to defy solution. They are complicated, but they don't always need to be impossible.

Thank you.

The Vice-Chairman (Mr. Gary Lunn): Thank you very much.

I would now like to call Kathie Scarfo, who is a fisherman and also president of the West Coast Trollers. I learned today that you are a fisherman and not a fisherwoman.

Ms. Kathie Scarfo (President, West Coast Trollers): I'm glad somebody clarified that for me. I've been somewhat confused.

• 1845

I'm going to do something I don't usually do. I threw away my speech after listening to Corky Evans, because basically I think he stole it from me. So I've made some notes, and I'm going to try to stay within five minutes. Speed me up if you have to and cut me off when you need to. I'm just going to do this from the hip and try not to repeat what you've already heard too much.

I represent the west coast troll fleet, which is on the west coast of Vancouver Island. We cover the same territory as the Nuu-chah-nulth Tribal Council, with whom we work very closely. We also work very closely with the communities on the west coast. Much as when the Minister of Fisheries was speaking he sounded like he was the Minister of Economic Development, fisheries is connected to economies and it is also connected to culture and it also has social impacts. To try to separate those from one another is an impossible feat. I think by trying to do that we fail miserably. So we have done it in a different manner.

We work closely with the other user groups. We recognize the fact that our deckhands are a part of our fleet, that businesses that rely on us are a part of our fleet, and we all need access to a common property resource. We're in this for the long term; we're not in this for the short term. So the tragedy of the common concept is a cliché that gets terribly abused in this province and probably in this country. I think it needs serious debate. I think when Corky Evans brought up the privatization of the resource, that is an issue that has not had debate and yet it is going ahead without consideration. I think that is one of the issues I would like to make sure this standing committee brings to the attention of the public and that we have the opportunity to discuss these kinds of things.

Basically, trollers are hunters. We go out there with synthetic gear and hunt for fish. We're basically hookers. I realize that some of you are from far away—from Grand Falls or Gander or Gaspésie. For a lot of the people you're going to be speaking to in the next little while, for all that it may be far away, it's a lot less remote to a lot of us than Ottawa is.

I would like to talk about a lot of things that you will be hearing in the next little while and maybe set a tone for you to stop and think about what you're hearing and why you're hearing it.

We have a reputation in the salmon industry. We have to compete with that reputation. Basically, that reputation is that we are an overcapitalized self-interest group that whines a lot and are out there to catch the last fish. I would like to say that I beg to differ. I would say that we are independent owner-operators for the most part that have a long-term commitment and foresight.

At this point, our biggest problem is that we are not allowed to participate in the decision-making process. We have heard about overfishing on the east coast and on the west coast, and a lot of us wear the blame for that. I hope that a lot of people realize that we don't control that. We go where, when, how, and harvest what we are allowed to harvest. Maybe if we had a little bit more say in that we wouldn't run into the problems that we face.

I'd like to quickly run through a status report on DFO's performance from our point of view as trollers on this coast. And when I say DFO, I don't mean individuals within DFO but the bureaucracy as a whole.

As far as biology goes, financial cutbacks have had a serious effect. We have had no in-season monitoring. We have poor stock assessment. We have no ability to address changes in a changing natural resource such as El Nino, so we suffer the impacts.

As far as international obligations between Canada and the U.S. go, we have been abandoned by the federal government. We have had a fleet reduction because we have not enough fish to go around within our Canadian fleet. Part of that is because nobody came to our defence and they allowed the Americans to continue to overharvest. So we have gone through a fleet reduction to accommodate a reallocation of fish to the Americans.

On international principles, we have undue disruptions to our communities that have not been taken into account. We have a code of conduct internationally that Canada has signed on to through the United Nations on responsible fisheries management, and we never see that translated down to a regional level as to how we actually manage our fisheries. I would be afraid to say that it would be a pity to see the kinds of efforts that went into writing those kinds of responsible conduct abandoned and sitting on a shelf somewhere.

As far as protection of the public interest goes, I think we've heard a fair amount on the privatization. It is a common property resource as far as most of us know, but the reality is that it is being privatized.

• 1850

We've seen what's happened in privatization of other natural resources. I think the abalone on the coast here would be an example: within five years of a privatization we had no abalone fishery any more.

The U.S. government put a moratorium on the privatization and individual quota system until they examine it in fuller detail. I think we should do that here.

The minister's powers basically make the poor individual a dictator. The new Fisheries Act actually goes that one step further and allows him even more sweeping powers.

As far as sustainable fisheries initiatives, we hear a lot about them but we don't see them. We have a concentration of capacity, and we've heard about fleet reduction. Nobody has talked about the reduction of capacity. Basically we've had a shift in who gets to fish, but we have not reduced the capacity of the fleet. I think that's something the Fisheries Council of British Columbia and other people who are advocating further fleet reduction should be looking at—a capacity reduction.

We have over-capitalization that's encouraged by the Mifflin plan. Basically we were told we couldn't make a living fishing the whole coast, as there were too many of us. Nobody's going to debate how many we were. But telling a farmer that he can't make a living because the market's dropped but you can still have your barn and your tractor and all your infrastructure but we're going to take away half of your land doesn't help you out. Nobody I know gets further ahead by going further into debt to harvest exactly what they used to be able to have access to.

In our sector we've been going ahead on our own trying to develop sustainable fisheries. We've looked at barbless hooks. We've looked at computerized monitoring programs with the University of British Columbia, the Bamfield marine station. Yesterday in Victoria our association, along with the tribal councils, the communities, and other user groups, including the Sport Fishing Institute advisory board, met with the Department of Fisheries and Oceans, the federal government, and the provincial government at the treaty level and tabled interim agreements on aquatic marine resource conservation boards, which we will be continuing to work towards, which means local management of the resource.

To move ahead with any of these sustainable fisheries initiatives we have to know what our access to the resource is. Nobody makes an investment without knowing that they're going to have a future.

I'm trying not to touch too much on the Mifflin plan, because basically I think we're all sick to death with it out here. But as much as we're sick to death with it, it's a reality. The reality is that it's a series of broken promises. Some of those promises included that the fleet reduction through the buy-back would be balanced, which didn't happen; that there would be no reallocation to other user groups, which hasn't happened; that no matter what, there would be no reallocation, and the increase of net share to the corporate-concentrated seine sector would not happen. Well the reality of the fact is that for all that Mr. Anderson's economists are telling him something, since the Mifflin plan our sector has gone from harvesting 30% of the total allowable catch down to 16% over two years, and that has gone directly into the corporate-concentrated hands.

In the Mifflin plan one of our serious concerns was the regional impacts. Nowhere within that plan or any other plans that we are seeing put forward in the privatization of the resource has there been any social, economic, and cultural impact study done. This is something where I'm talking about separating those issues from one another and trying to bring them back together within this.

Improved consultation was one of the key elements in the Mifflin plan, as well as security of access to your share of the allocation. Those are the two key items that have not happened. Most of the bitching and complaining, to quote former regional director Louis Tousignant, that happens on this coast is due to allocation: who gets what share of the fish, be you native, be you sports, be you commercial, or be you environmentalists—or I guess an American at this point. That allocation discussion was supposed to be finished by 1996. We're into 1998, and that hasn't happened. We don't know what our share of the resource is.

Improved consultation—well, we consider our association to be rather exclusive, because we're excluded from most of the consultation processes. We've been turned down from a seat on the international stakeholders process. We've been turned down seats at the commercial fishing industry council, which is meeting today to decide who gets what share of the fish. We've been turned down a seat at the local level on the regional management board through the south coast advisory OTAC. We've had to fight tooth and nail to make it into anywhere. So if I'm taking up a little bit more of your time than I should, it's because I don't get a chance anywhere else.

• 1855

Improved consultation.... How are we supposed to solve the problems in this industry? You've heard it over and over again here today: we need to be consulted. I beg to differ. We've been consulted to death. If consultation is what we've seen, we don't need that. What we want is participation in the decision-making processes, and we're entitled to that as users, as taxpayers, and as people who care about this resource.

If you're looking for solutions, the first thing you usually start with is discussion. We don't have that here. We have select groups of haves and have nots competing against each other. We do not have open, qualified, comprehensive discussion coast-wide with all user groups. I have never had the opportunity to sit down with the goeyduc divers and find out how they manage their fishery with a user pay, user say method. This is a serious handicap to the future of this industry.

I'm going to close. We've seen standing committees before. Basically you are the only group of people who can make the Department of Fisheries and Oceans accountable, make sure they follow through, and make sure the principles we have signed internationally are abided by on a local level.

I have no idea if you're going to be travelling the coast and then going back to Ottawa and forgetting about us, but I hope you recognize the importance of your role to us, to our future, and to our communities.

I'm hoping you give us a voice and that you allow us to find solutions for the future that we can participate in and not look at the black and white solutions the economists put down in front of us. I think we can make a difference, and I think with your help we can do that.

Thank you.

The Vice-Chairman (Mr. Gary Lunn): Ms. Mae Burrows.

Ms. Mae Burrows (Executive Director, T. Buck Suzuki Foundation): I work with an organization called the T. Buck Suzuki Environmental Foundation. It's an organization that works with people in the commercial fishing industry as well as coastal people throughout British Columbia and people throughout the province on environmental issues related to fish habitat and water quality.

Because of the particular migration and life cycle of salmon...salmon travel not only the ocean and through coastal communities, but they travel the entire Fraser basin to go back to their native spawning streams.

The key message I want to bring to the standing committee today is a message about how important it is to protect salmon habitats. A healthy environment really does mean a healthy fishery. The various members who work in T. Buck Suzuki—known as gumboot Suzuki—Environmental Foundation have been doing work for decades to protect fish habitat in British Columbia.

There are a number of points I want to touch on, but each of them does go back to the fact that it's very much community supported—the notion of looking after fish habitat and protecting it and also the various things you need to think about that haven't been touched on today that do affect fish habitat. That includes not only El Niño, which was commented on, but you should be thinking about all kinds of other things, such as the effects of urbanization on salmon streams, urban run-off on water quality in the estuary, completely untreated sewage that goes into the Fraser estuary. It's still one of the most important salmon rivers in the world and we put literally billions and billions of untreated sewage into the receding waters. That happens coast-wide.

We also want to be talking about things like hydro projects and water diversions such as the Kemano completion project way up in Kitimat, which affects runs like the Stewart run, which is a really important run, as well as all the other fish up in the Nechako River.

For people who don't come from British Columbia—and I know you're travelling to just coastal communities—salmon don't just travel the same places that you've travelled. They travel throughout the province, and a healthy environment does mean a healthy fishery.

One of the first points I want to make is going back to what has already been said about licences. We work at a very grassroots levels, at a very dock-to-dock kind of level. What we've seen with the Mifflin plan is that it is small boat owners and local people, the very people who have a legacy of fighting so hard, decade after decade, to protect fish habitat, who are being forced out of the industry. It hasn't done it in terms of reducing capacity, which is the goal. Instead, it's the people who really do care and put back into the resource that are getting pushed out.

• 1900

I believe people having a direct interest in protecting habitat is the essence of sustainability, and that is what the Mifflin plan is working directly against.

We don't have it right yet, and I would really encourage people to go back to Ottawa and try to continue working with people in the fishing communities on this licensing issue, because it's not working.

Likewise, the Canada-U.S. salmon treaty is something I would urge all parties to be very concerned about, because the fishing season is nearly upon us. Last year, many times after commercial fishermen in British Columbia had in fact hung up their nets, fish that we have nurtured at a community level continued to be fished, and that just doesn't work if we're going to rebuild the stocks. I would really encourage a resolution of that treaty.

We strongly support the equity principle. We think that's another real aspect of sustainability, that after conservation, fish that are returning and that have come from Canadian waters really do belong to the livelihoods of coastal communities and the people who live there.

A third point I'd like to bring up, which hasn't been brought up yet today, but I suspect it will be brought up again because it's being talked about a lot in British Columbia, is the agreement that the federal government is negotiating right now at an international level, the multilateral agreement on investment, the MIA. We are very concerned about that in the environmental community because we understand right now that Ethyl Corporation, which was told by the Canadian government that they could not bring the neurotoxin into this country and continue producing it.... They have taken Canada to court now, saying that is a disincentive, that is an impediment to their foreign corporate investment, and we in Canada no longer have the sovereign right to make pollution laws in this country. We'll see how that lawsuit unfolds, but I would really encourage all of you to be following the Ethyl Corp lawsuit.

The MIA needs to be opened up. We need to start hearing what it is our government is negotiating on our behalf internationally, because it could mean that point around pollution; it could also mean that something as important and sovereign as the equity right in the Canada-U.S. treaty could be up for grabs, because that just might not be fair to give those fish to Canadian fishermen instead of to a foreign corporation. That's just not right for us here in British Columbia.

A fourth point I want to bring up is around the Kemano completion project. It's been brought up a couple of other times. Here on the west coast we consider it to be one of Canada's great national scandals. As has been pointed out, it started in 1987 with the Conservative government giving the rights to most of a river to a multinational corporation.

There was suppression and the manipulation of science. It was a very shameful kind of issue, but very much a habitat issue here in British Columbia. People in this room fought it and turned it around. It is the provincial government that did indeed cancel the Kemano completion project. They have brought legislation into place.

The story is not over yet because we have no involvement whatsoever from the federal government, from the Department of Fisheries and Oceans, and that's just terrible. It's not okay. They have no excuse any longer.

Minister Anderson, and Tobin before him, was saying the NDP government in British Columbia cancelled that project; they can deal with it. Well, now they've dealt with it. They've enacted the legislation. They've enacted a three-party committee to start fixing the Nechako River, to start correcting the water flows there because those fish in the Stewart.... We're way up in northern British Columbia, past Prince George. Those fish need more water in the river and the river needs restoration.

The province has set up a committee, a structure. The federal government has refused to participate.

You must urge David Anderson to do three things. First, he must start participating on that committee, the Nechako enhancement committee, so that there is a senior federal DFO presence on that committee. He needs to toady up with the $50 million restoration money that has already been committed by the province and by Alcan. It's the only way I can see us working towards getting a Kenney Dam cold water release. The salmon need to have cold water released from the watershed, from the dam, at critical times during the summer. They have migrated up the Fraser River. They have stopped eating at the mouth of the Fraser, because that's what happens with salmon. They stop and they live off their oil and their body fat. Those Nechako salmon swim 37 days up the Fraser without eating, and it's not okay if they hit hot water up there. So we need a Kenney Dam cold water release.

• 1905

The federal government absolutely has responsibility for contributing to that. Both Alcan and the province have done their share. Now it is really the federal government's responsibility to get there.

Third, David Anderson must, as we have been asking Tobin and other federal ministers before him, rewrite a directive ensuring that there are correct water levels in the Nechako River.

These are very doable things. They are completely the responsibility of DFO. We would urge DFO to start taking on that responsibility. It's really important to coastal communities throughout British Columbia.

The last thing I would like to say goes directly back to habitat. The Department of Fisheries and Oceans has the responsibility every year to write an annual report. The haven't even been able to get it together to write an annual report for the last three years. The reports don't have enough detail and accountability in them, but they are not even writing reports. At the very least, we should see annual reports from DFO.

What we have been calling for with a number of environmental groups for many years now, directly to DFO in a whole bunch of different ways, is please, do what it is you are responsible for and do a state of the habitat report.

There are so many places where we really focus on who is catching the fish and so on. That's important, but at the other end of the picture.... For instance, with coho, we are taking a look at stock assessment and allocation. What we are asking for is a state of coho habitat report. Coho, for instance, are extremely vulnerable to habitat laws in the city, in the suburbs, in rural areas, through logging, for all kinds of different reasons. They live in small streams for one or two years, so they are extremely vulnerable. That's where a lot of coho have gone. What we want is a state of the habitat report for all the stock. Again, that is something that is very doable.

It allows me to leave as my final and key message with you to be thinking about all the various ways in which fish habitat needs to be protected so that we can have sustainable communities here in British Columbia.

Thank you.

The Vice-Chairman (Mr. Gary Lunn): I want to take a chance here. We have been going along this list. We have a list here with another 40 speakers and we want to get through it all, but I have a problem. It is the fishermen who probably came here to speak, and it is not fair to make them sit here for three or four hours. If there are two fishermen who want to come up, we will slot them in right now. If not, we will carry on.

Mr. Richard Normura (President, Area E Gillnetters Association): I'm here on behalf of the area E licence fishermen. Basically, it's the Fraser River fishermen.

I'd like to talk about the reallocation of fish. The reallocation of fish stocks to native uses is the largest issue facing Fraser River fishermen today. We have seen the largest uncompensated transfers of salmon here in the Fraser River.

Everyone agrees with the aboriginal entitlement of fish under section 35, but reallocations to natives through pilot sales, which is part of the AFS program, and ESSR, which is excess salmon to spawning requirement permits, and living fisheries have been granted without compensation to the commercial fleet.

The government must address these privileges that have been granted to special Canadians. We are aware of the Canadian government's fiduciary relationship to the natives in granting such privileges, but the commercial fleet must be compensated for these policies.

The solution to the problem this industry experiences today hinges on one question: what is the Government of Canada's commitment to the commercial fishing fleet?

The Mifflin plan, although not having consensus, was forced upon us as a solution. The main concern of the plan was the security to the access of the resource. The minister stated at that time, and gave assurances to the fleet, that the fleet reduction process would not merely result in a reduction of allocation of the same amount, but would generate efficiencies and benefits for those who stayed in the industry.

The complexity and flaw of such a plan is realized now in the terms of reference for mediation of allocation among commercial gear sectors under the management, principles, directions, and constraints in which DFO states that it will no longer guarantee allocations to each gear.

• 1910

Uncompensated transfers to natives through pilot sales, ESSR permits, living fisheries, and other native requirements have offset the benefits of fleet reduction. The vessel reduction of 30% through the Mifflin plan did not allow each vessel to harvest 30% more than if there was no plan in place, because 30% of the licences weren't removed. Stacking gave a false indication of fleet reduction. Also, many of the vessels bought in the buy-back were inefficient and did not catch their share of the allocation.

Although DFO has stated its commitment to the industry, it has implemented changes that are meant to reach other objectives. No longer can we accept the commitments of the minister unless they are enforceable. We are no longer being treated fairly because of the fiduciary relationship of the government with the natives. But this government has the obligation to its Canadians that helped develop this country to a fair and equitable solution, rather than treating us like a disposable lighter.

The commercial sector is frustrated with DFO's continuous changes. We need stability and a clear direction of what this government's intentions are. If transfers are to occur in the future, we need enforceable commitments that the industry will be compensated first. The commercial fleet is still too large in harvesting the resource. We agree with the minister that fleet reduction is probably in the best interests of the industry.

Aquaculture has capped the value of a wild resource, and the prices in the forseeable future will remain low. Therefore, the need is even greater for the commercial fleet to harvest more.

We hope that, through the Sam Toy process, each sector will have a clearly defined allocation that will be enforced. Future transfers, which we expect to see through treaty settlements, must include heavy compensation to the commercial fleet. If fleet reduction is a mechanism for transfer, there must be a residue benefit for the remaining fleet. Buying vessels and transferring quotas is not compensation; it's simply transfers. We must have assurances that transfers in the future will not lead to the systematic dismantling of the commercial fleet, but that the proper mechanisms of transfers will be in place that will benefit the remaining fleet.

Thank you.

The Vice-Chairman (Mr. Gary Lunn): Thank you.

Mr. Jim Nightingale (Individual Presentation): Mr. Chairman, I'm a commercial fisherman and I have a troller.

The Vice-Chairman (Mr. Gary Lunn): What is your name, sir?

Mr. Jim Nightingale: My name is Jim Nightingale.

As you are aware, on the west coast, salmon stocks and the industry that they support are in crisis. I would like to bring to your attention two aspects of this crisis, one that doesn't get too much exposure. That's the first point here.

The first aspect does not get much attention because those affected by it are geographically isolated and lack the financial resources, and that's the political influence of their adversaries. I refer to the situation the northern troll fleet finds itself in.

For the last 80 years, the area around Langara Island and the spring salmon that migrate through this area have been of prime importance to the small-boat, northern trollers. For many years, we were the only user of this resource, except for food fish. About ten years ago, commercial sports lodges began to move into the area. Unlike commercial fishermen, who have had limited entry since the 1960s, they did not need to take over an existing operation. Presently, during the summer months, there is a small city of camps located in the once pristine Parry Passage.

A few years ago, when the stocks began experiencing difficulties, we were put on a limited catch allowance in the north. To our surprise, the sports industry was given the same catch allowance. This is a group that just started a few years previous to that. Several years ago, stocks were in such low abundance that it was decided trollers would not be allowed to fish spring salmon at all; yet somehow lodges were allowed to keep fishing.

Last season, northern trollers found that Langara Island, our most important spring fishing area, would henceforth be off limits to trollers and was to be an exclusive sports fishing preserve. This has happened because DFO policy has been unduly influenced by political pressure from commercial sports fishing interests.

The greatest success in this regard has been the appointment of Mr. Anderson as Minister of Fisheries, a man with very close ties to this group. Since his appointment, we have seen the chief spokesperson for the Sport Fishing Institute, the main lobby for the sports industry, become the minister's regional adviser. That's Velma McColl.

• 1915

Trollers have become victims of a successful propaganda campaign by the seine lobby group—trollers and all commercial fishermen. Documents such as the ARA consultants' report, a brief as thick as the Vancouver city telephone book, have been put out to try to establish that sports-caught fish are more important to our economy than commercially caught fish. These reports generally gloss over such things as the importance of export dollars from the commercial industry versus discretionary recreational spending, much of which is money that is recycled within our domestic economy, and money that is not spent on sports fishing would be spent on other things.

Most importantly for trollers in those small towns that support them and depend on their custom, such as Masset, the lodges provide precious little in the way of decent jobs or economic spin-offs to replace the money they are draining away as they displace trollers.

I'll just touch very briefly on the second item and that is the treaty. To all B.C. salmon fishers, and especially those in the north, this is a matter of grave importance. It has cost us and our communities a half billion dollars over the last few years. It is money that would make a difference. This government and this minister do not seem to give this issue a high level of priority. I have a feeling that if an international dispute was costing some industry in central Canada this much money, Mr. Chrétien would soon be on the phone to Mr. Clinton, not throwing his hands in the air and asking what can we do.

Thank you.

The Vice-Chairman (Mr. Gary Lunn): Go ahead.

Mr. Jim White (Native Brotherhood of British Columbia): Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

The Native Brotherhood of British Columbia is an organization in its sixty-eighth year in the commercial fishery. We're also an organization that has fought for rights in terms of our opportunities. Opportunities are in many areas. You've heard a tremendous amount this afternoon about AFS, about native people, about buy-outs, about allocations going to native people. You heard a gentleman here within the last ten minutes talk about his involvement, his parents' involvement, his grandparents' involvement in the fishery.

I remind him that back in 1939 his people were taken out of the fisheries. They were moved inland. In 1949 the government of the day in Ottawa wrote to the Native Brotherhood of British Columbia and asked if the Japanese population could be returned to coastal British Columbia because they wanted to get back into the fishery. They asked us to let them know whether we wanted the Japanese to be kept out, because they would keep them out. Our leadership of that day said this coast is big and they too derive their economy out of the fisheries. It could handle us and it could handle them; let them back in. That's what they were told. Now they are here talking to you about what is happening to me today, to the people I represent.

I find it really insulting to hear that. If people want to throw stones, look at your history to see what has happened, to see what society has done to you, as they have done to us. Equality, equity—we couldn't even secure loans to access boats on reserves in this community.

Nobody has talked about coastal communities, up and down the coast, the resources in our backyard. Where does the bulk of fishermen come from? The big centres.

We haven't had the opportunity of getting a second and third licence, the opportunity of other licences. If we have, it's too late because we've had to travel too far. That's reality.

Sure, industry has changed. When I was a kid I was told by my dad that I would never be a commercial fisherman, and I never have been. I asked him why at that time and he said the industry was changing too rapidly. This was in 1954. He told me at that time that one day—you have to remember that at that time he was fishing six days a week from the beginning of June until the middle of November—the commercial fishermen are not going to be fighting for days, they're going to be fighting for hours. You look at where the fishing industry is today. The change has come. I asked him how he arrived at that. He told me he used to row around in a dory to go fishing for the big companies. Now he has a boat with an engine. It's not going to stop there. That's exactly what is happening. The industry and everything has changed, and we continue to take the brunt of it.

• 1920

I speak for 31 communities up and down the coast that have constantly been the recipients of lost opportunities. We've attempted to secure funding to retrain. Retrain for what? We're in those communities. Other people have the opportunity of coming into our backyard. Maybe we should accelerate this treaty issue and say put a halt to everything until such time as we're back at the table, talking to everyone—government. On that basis we need to be heard.

Time and time again we've been through the court system. We've won a few and lost plenty, but that's your system.

I look at the make-up of your committee and the number of aboriginal people in Parliament in Ottawa. You don't have a sympathetic ear in terms of where we're coming from and what we're trying to say. Yet we're the losers in the whole process.

I need to say that because everybody is hurting. Everybody on this coast is hurting, including us. I'm not going to sit back and take the brunt of it. Everybody has contributed to that hurt.

The Vice-Chairman (Mr. Gary Lunn): I want to go back to the list, if I can.

Chief John Henderson (Campbell River Indian Band): I'd like to speak. I have to catch a plane.

The Vice-Chairman (Mr. Gary Lunn): Okay, go ahead. You were the fourth guy down on my list here.

Chief John Henderson: I am a commercial fisherman, and you called commercial fishermen up.

The Vice-Chairman (Mr. Gary Lunn): There's no problem. We're just trying to accommodate everybody. Go ahead.

Chief John Henderson: I have a few issues I want to get off my chest. As you know, as a commercial fisherman...over the years it's been a long hard battle. You see the numbers here. We're outnumbered as first nations people, but I'm here because I have concerns.

I'm a commercial fisherman and I make my living from the fishing industry. I'm also representing 11 first nations on the coast, and I'm speaking on behalf of Kwakiutl first nations. I'm the vice-president of the Kwakiutl District Council. I have a grave concern about the livelihoods of not only first nations people, but non-first nations.

I don't want to point fingers, but you have to. It's a situation we didn't create; government created it. The problem is AFS programs. The sports fishing industry is growing. Lodges are being built up and down the coast. We're slowly being pushed out of the areas we have historically fished all our lives. If it wasn't so, we wouldn't have points or bays named after some of the hereditary chiefs of our country in our local waters.

I feel slighted by the fact that every year the area we fish in local waters is getting smaller. Historically, we have fished in areas...and now we have nowhere to go. I'm in favour of the Mifflin plan if in fact it downsizes the fleet, but don't downsize the areas. That's what has happened. How is it going to work? You're still pitting one fisherman against another because you've boxed us into a little area. Johnstone Strait isn't the only place they do that. If you're going to open it, open the whole coast. Resolve some of these issues.

• 1925

Our bands, our local tribes of the Laich-Kwil-Tach territories, Campbell River, Cape Mudge, and Kwakiah, are reliant on the fishing industry and everything that goes with it. We have been reliant for centuries. It's well documented. To be pushed out of our area is a sad thing.

I can understand that from the non-native fisherman's perspective there is a difference of opinion; but everybody has their opinion. I don't mind that. I have my opinion. Our first nations have our opinion about the AFS program and how it has affected us. It's literally decimating the local communities, because we survive by the fish that swim past our doors. It's affecting not only non-first nations, it's affecting the first nations in our local areas. There has to be a better way. How we resolve that I don't know. It's up to you guys to decide that, I guess. But if it's left up to you guys, I don't know if it's going to be any good or not.

It's a situation where maybe we have to come together collectively and find out if somehow we can walk down the same street and shake each other's hands rather than pit one industry against another. You have the gillnetters fighting with the seiners, trollers fighting with the gillnetters, and vice versa. Well, we didn't create that. We're trying to resolve it now. We want to be heard.

I sympathize with the non-native fishermen, because they are getting hurt just as much as we are. I sympathize with what Jim White is saying, talking history. Well, I'm talking history too.

It's a sad thing when you sit on a beach and you watch the fish go by for somebody else to benefit from them. That's not really fair to anybody. We all deserve an equal portion of that fish, whether you're native or non-native. It's a situation where there's some resolution to it. I think we have to sit down in a room as fishermen and hash it out collectively. It's a situation where over the years we as leaders of our community have been trying to resolve these issues with the Sto:lo Nation, for example.

Last year was a good example of something that happened and should never have happened. We had a levee fishery in Johnstone Strait without first consulting our local tribes. As much as we protested it, it still went on. Who created that? It was the federal government, the Department of Fisheries.

How do we resolve those? I don't want an answer now, but six months down the road you have to come up with something, some different plan that's going to work. The more consultation processes you have with the fishermen and native communities up and down the coast, the more we all will benefit in the end, as long as you take into consideration what we are saying.

I've been around politics for many years and I've seen what works and what doesn't work. When you are butting heads all the time, it doesn't work. We have to sit down together on both sides of the table and just work together.

You have all these court decisions coming down. I don't have to bring you up to date with those. How are we going to resolve those issues if it keeps going and gets larger than it is?

I was speaking at an LRMP conference the other day—land resource management planning. It's a situation where we have to learn to share, whether it be forestry or the other sectors, mining, all the resources. We're not here to take everything. We're here to work with people. Everybody has to start realizing that. We're not trying to push people out of anything. All we want is an equal opportunity in the labour force. We've always said this, over and over again. Our local people are trying to participate in all sectors.

We are involved in other businesses. Our nation is, as a lot of you probably know, going into economic entities. John Duncan has been in our community and has seen what we've been doing. We've learned over the years that we have to work together, and I think if we're going to work together we have to have more meetings like this, where we're able to sit across from you guys. The people who have concerns must be heard.

• 1930

I hope you take that into consideration, because without these people, you guys wouldn't be there. And that's a fact. Thank you.

Some hon. members: Hear, hear!

The Vice-Chairman (Mr. Gary Lunn): Thank you.

Next is Doug Walker from the B.C. Wildlife Federation.

A witness: Doug had to leave.

The Vice-Chairman (Mr. Gary Lunn): Okay, and if he comes back we'll accommodate him. Next we have Stan Watterson from the Pacific Trollers Association.

Mr. Stan Watterson (President, Pacific Trollers Association): Good afternoon. I'm the president of the Pacific Trollers Association, an association that was established in 1956. I apologize for the lack of enough copies to go around the main table, but I wasn't expecting this many people to be here.

Our association represents fishermen holding current licences in all three Mifflin areas. Our members support the Pacific Salmon Treaty and the Pacific Salmon Commission.

I have four points to make here. I realize there are lots of other goods points and I'm sure you people have heard them all, and they're still coming, I'm sure.

First, it is essential that the issue identified by Strangway and Ruckelshaus be resolved. We also support Mr. Yves Fortier continuing as chief Canadian negotiator. We consider him the “A Team”. Let's get on with it and not lose the present advantage created by the Strangway and Ruckelshaus reports.

Second, licence fees have gone up from $400 to $1,340 for trollers. In 1996 licence fees accounted for approximately 10% of the income of the troll fleet. Government then gave us a choice of paying the fee to fish or notifying the department that we would not be fishing in that year in order to save this exorbitant fee.

With the fishing prospects in 1998, once again 10% of projected income will be spent on licence fees. Because of the high proportion of licence fees, there is a trend developing where fishermen are postponing their maintenance, their insurance, moorage fees and other fixed costs in order to pay the licence fee. This is becoming dangerous for all concerned and should be addressed immediately.

I think that is a very serious point. People in the industry are now neglecting to insure their vessels. They're tied up in harbours, and in most cases there are probably two or three vessels tied up along side them. They're running the risk of destroying numerous family lives here due the fact that they just can't afford to buy insurance for their vessels. I think you people at the head table should definitely look into that one immediately.

The third remark I have to make is about the ESSR fisheries—excess salmon to spawning requirements. Access to these fisheries should not be prioritized, but should be open to native and non-native participants on a bidding system. Right now it seems as though it's just a closed shop, and I'm sure most of the fishermen out here feel there should be a fair and equitable way to obtain whatever access to the resource is available to them.

Fourth, our membership feels very strongly that intersectoral allocations now being settled by Judge Samuel Toy and sectoral allocations that will be settled by Mr. Stephen Kelleher must be settled before the 1998 salmon season commences. I say that because in the past year we've been promised this. It's been coming down for the last few years. It was supposed to have been settled last year and nothing came down the table. Numerous fishermen were left in positions where they had very little income, and as I say, that left them in desperate shape. There are a lot of boats out there now that have no insurance on them.

That's all I have to say to you people. Thank you very much for your patience and your time.

Voices: Hear, hear!

The Vice-Chairman (Mr. Gary Lunn): Thank you, Mr. Watterson.

Is Fred Fortier here from the Aboriginal Fishers Commission?

• 1935

Mr. Fred Fortier (Chair, B.C. Aboriginal Fisheries Commission): Good evening. I'm a Secwepemc from the interior of British Columbia, about four or five hours from here in the Kamloops area, where I reside.

I would like to introduce who I am. I'm the chair of the B.C. Aboriginal Fisheries Commission, but I also take on responsibilities chairing the Canadian Columbia Inter-Tribal Fisheries Commission. If you don't know it, fish are still coming up the Columbia on the Okanagan side, quite a few of them this last year. I also chair my own tribal fisheries commission, the Secwepemc Nation Fisheries Commission.

I believe in my short time chairing these organizations this has been my third response to the standing committee. I'm not sure whether the members are getting younger or I'm getting older.

I think here today we should ask ourselves who does speak on behalf of the fish. I've heard a lot today, but I haven't heard anybody say “I speak for the fish, and this is what I will do for the fish”. I haven't heard that.

With a right and a privilege in the fishery in this province comes a big responsibility, just as you have a big responsibility as MPs to live up to the honour of the crown, they say. That's a big commitment.

One of the first points I would like to make is that any consultation process that goes along in this province seems to miss out in areas where there is a major concern, and that is where the fish return to spawn. We have yet to have a standing committee come into the Kamloops area to speak about fish, the Prince George area, the Williams Lake area, the Lytton area. We have yet to mention Kelowna and the Okanagan system, the upper Skeena. Do we all forget that fish do spawn in the rivers?

I would like to follow that up with you, as chair of the BCAFC, to say to you in future consultations in this province let's sit down and discuss what the consultation process would look like so it's fair to all people in British Columbia, both aboriginal and non-aboriginal, and from the interior too. That's a strong message, Mr. Chairman, that you should be taking back. I'll follow this up later with a letter to you.

Also, my presentation is going to be from the Secwepemc people. We will be coordinating a written response to the standing committee as first nations in this province. I will carry out my responsibility to do that, and I will make that available to you, Mr. Chairman.

One of the areas I'm going to look at is one of the most powerful and most positive things in this province we have to address in fisheries, and that's partnerships. Former speakers have talked about those partnerships with first nations, with sporting groups. Those partnerships have to occur in regional areas.

I would like to comment on what a partnership might result in. In the area I'm from, in the Thompson basin, we have formed a partnership with the local fishermen, the non-aboriginal people. This partnership looks at educating ourselves about fisheries, aboriginal rights, and sitting at the table and coming down together about common solutions and common principles. That is what partnerships are about.

• 1940

Lo and behold, we don't have this fighting between us about who gets access to the fish, because we are talking about the fish first and foremost. We formed a partnership called the Thompson Basin Council. In the last couple of weeks, because of the Sam Toy process, we all got together and decided that something we could do collectively was to put principles forward. We have put forward nine principles. They are in the handout I have forwarded to you.

B.C. interior communities see themselves as caretakers of the salmon and their freshwater habitats as well as recipients of benefits arising from wise-use practices and good stewardship. Therefore a greater emphasis on including inland communities and associated planning is desirable when discussing fisheries renewal or inter-sectoral allocation of related fisheries benefits.

I will catch just a few here, Mr. Chairman, to shorten the presentation. I was hoping I would get the same time as Corky.

The policy of allocation of Pacific salmon after conservation and section 35.(1)s are met should emphasize the best sustainable economic value of the catch. That's a common principle we share in the interior.

The principle of salmon conservation requires a clear and concise definition by managing agencies. As you know, we don't have a definition of conservation. It's funny how we say we're managers and after conservation come first nations needs, but we can't describe what conservation is.

One of the saddest things I will have to present today is this graph you have. I will mention it here. Look for yourselves at this graph about coho. Just looking at it makes you want to cry. If we have a commitment to conservation, as your minister has said, look where we are in coho.

These are examples of partnerships, and these have to occur. We can argue forever, but salmon will not be around if we argue forever. We have to do something.

For the Secwepemc people, I'm here for the third time now, saying exactly the same thing. I am going to deal specifically with coho.

In 1977, DFO files identified Thompson coho stocks as threatened with extinction. Last summer one of our communities entered into a court challenge on that, over a DFO fishery regulation which allowed harvest of threatened Thompson River coho. We know who caught those fish.

DFO's reduction of harvest rates and recreational and commercial south coast coho fisheries last summer may have protected some coho stocks, but in spawning streams last fall coho spawners dropped by a third to two-thirds of the brood year. What did our minister say to you? We did accomplish something, but our stocks of coho went down. Their numbers went from around 20,000 down to around 2,000 this past year.

• 1945

When you look at the graph, it's very graphic, isn't it? Is that a responsibility of MPs?

The story is shared not only by the Fraser but by the Thompson and Columbia salmon stocks, including chinook, sockeye, and steelhead populations—and the list goes on. The cause is overfishing—not overfishing through blatant disregard for conservation but overfishing through non-selective harvest of Pacific salmon, through use of destructive fishing gear, and by allowing high levels of harvest in locations of significant stock mixing. As one of our chiefs has said, our fishery has become other people's by-catch.

It's fitting that we're in a church. Maybe we could have a prayer to our coho, because I don't know if the powers of today will save our coho. That's a fact.

So what do we, as the Secwepemc people, put forward? First, eliminate selective harvests on south coast coho salmon and divert those harvests to terminal and river mouth locations, where they are capable of supporting that harvest. Our strategy is consistent with DFO's move to risk-averse management and will amount to a geographic expansion of selective recreational fisheries. This will allow recovery of our weak stocks and protection of our aboriginal rights and meet the building targets on the spawning grounds, which we like to say we've been consulted on.

Also, the strategies, where employed with coho salmon stocks and other salmon stocks, will allow for expansion of a more ecologically sensitive fishery. In time, as wild stocks recover, these expanded fisheries will become more productive. We have to invest in the fish to get more fish.

The last one is an example of the new approach to salmon fisheries described in the list of principles I read out. We've been involved in a lot of processes, as Secwepemc people, in the past. I think the recovery of weakened salmon stocks is not a luxury but a legal priority, and it's borne in Canada's commitment to international conventions. The Supreme Court of Canada stated in Sparrow in 1990 that our priority right is second only to conservation. This has encouraged us to define conservation.

Recently the same court has suggested our rights include economic interests in our local resources. This has encouraged us to define our interest in the fishery. The Convention on Biological Diversity, led by Canada at the Earth Summit in 1992, describes indigenous peoples' rights to access local resources and the value of traditional knowledge. I'm sorry to say our traditional knowledge before any commercial fishery here, at least in a non-aboriginal sense, was our weir system, which is disallowed by lobbying of the commercial sector to take away our management system.

Finally, people have mentioned the issue of the Pacific Salmon Commission. I say if Alaska were not part of the U.S. but belonged to Canada, do you think the argument would go away? I don't think so. There's always somebody ahead of you catching a fish. So it relates to regional resource benefit sharing. And what has Alaska asked Canada and the U.S. to do? Please help us; go talk to the Japanese and Russians to keep them from catching our fish.

With that I would like to close and say that the first nations in this province are part of the solution, not part of the problem.

• 1950

Mr. Chair, I would give you a copy of the Convention on Biological Diversity and hope that you pick up other copies for your members to read. I'd like to reference four areas within the Convention on Biological Diversity: 8(j), 10(c), article 17 paragraph 2, and article 18 paragraph 4. As MPs, you will see what Canada has committed to at the international level.

I thank you. Kukstsetsemc.

The Vice-Chairman (Mr. Gary Lunn): Thank you.

I'll mention the next four speakers, just so you will know when you're coming up. The first one's going to be Doug Walker, then we're going to have Greg D'Avignon, Mike Forrest, and Frank Cox.

Has Doug Walker come back into the room? No? I'm sorry, it's supposed to be Chris Day.

Go ahead, sir.

Mr. Chris Day (Executive Director, Deep Sea Trawlers Association): Thank you, Mr. Chairman and honourable members.

We've heard many problems about the salmon industry today, and quite rightly so, given the very serious challenges facing that industry. But there are other fishing industries on the west coast. We have heard from the underwater harvesters already, and I'm here to talk about the groundfish.

The Chairman: Mr. Day, as a point of clarification for the committee and for the record, you are from the Deep Sea Trawlers Association.

Mr. Chris Day: Correct.

The Chairman: Trawlers off the east coast of Canada are divided into two groups. One group drags nets.

Mr. Chris Day: Right.

The Chairman: And the other has trawls—that is, long lines with hooks coming from them. In which group are you?

Mr. Chris Day: We drag nets.

The Chairman: Side trawlers or stern trawlers?

Mr. Chris Day: Predominantly stern trawlers.

The Chairman: Fine. Go ahead, Mr. Day.

Mr. Chris Day: As I was saying to you, there are other fisheries on the west coast, and I'm going to be talking to you about the groundfish fishery.

The groundfish fishery, which includes trawl, hook and line, halibut and black cod, is by far the largest fishery on the west coast in terms of volume of fish. We land over 55% of all the fish here in B.C. They represent about 20% by value of the whole fishery on the west coast.

The trawl industry, which I represent, lands about 93% of that groundfish by volume and about 60% by value. The groundfish trawl fishery is a year-round fishery. All the fish requires further processing, so we produce an awful lot of full-time, year-round jobs.

We've heard a lot of negative stuff today, so just starting off with a positive point, when the groundfish trawl industry is examined it can be seen that the resource is in very good shape. It has been well managed. The fishermen have taken a very proactive role in fisheries management for sustainable use of the resource. We've increased the mesh size in Hecate Strait at five inches, six inches. We've had closed areas and such like, spawning areas. So we've done our bit to really protect the resource.

However, like the salmon industry, we too have our problems. We're facing some very serious economic hardships right now, many of which are directly the result of DFO policies. I just want to touch on a couple of those.

In 1996, an at-sea observer program was introduced to the trawl fleet. In this program a DFO certified observer was placed on every single trawler that was fishing on the bottom. That's 100% coverage. This is the only west coast fishery that has that level of coverage, and the only other commercial fishery that we know of is the northern shrimp fishery in Labrador, which is conducted by huge offshore factory freezer trawlers, many of which have foreign crews on them.

• 1955

DFO has stated that the reason for this observer program is for the accurate accounting of the total catch, both by species and by area, for estimating the discards—mortalities—and for estimating species size. They're very good things, but I would assume that the mandate would be the same for all fisheries across Canada: we need to know the accurate catch. Yet we find ourselves as the only west coast fishery with this level of coverage. When we look to the east coast we see that the average coverage is somewhere around 10% to 15%, whereas we are 100%, and as far as we are aware, the east coast program is very heavily subsidized by government, which pays all the administrative costs, which amount to 30% to 40% of the overall cost.

In contrast to this, our fishermen pay $365 a day for every day the observers are onboard the vessel, whether we catch a fish or not. The north Pacific in winter has some of the worst storms anywhere in the world, and quite often the observer cost for that trip will exceed the crew share. I don't mean the crew share for one person; I mean the crew share for the entire vessel.

At the start of the observer program it was stated that one of the reasons for the 100% level was concerns over the halibut by-catch. The program has been in for two years now, and if we look at the actual numbers on that, we see that in 1996, the first year, we only caught 39% of our halibut allocation, and in the current year, after the first nine months, we're only at 22% of our halibut allocation. Clearly the trawl fishery is fishing in a responsible and sustainable manner. Despite this fact and numerous appeals to the managers, they have refused to consider any reduction in the current level of at-sea observer coverage. This is causing major economic hardships to the fleet. The small boat fleet has stopped operating. Any vessel less than 55 feet cannot afford to operate with the observer program, and they haven't done so; they've tied up. Some of the larger vessels are paying in excess of $100,000 a year for this observer program.

What we are requesting is some degree of equality in the way this program is enforced across Canada, both between the east and the west coasts and between individual fisheries.

The second point I'd like to bring up is that in April 1997, last year, a system of individual vessel quotas was introduced into the groundfish trawl industry. At the time, 90% of the various TACs were allocated to the licence holders. The remaining 10% was awarded to the groundfish development authority, which is administered by a non-elected group of community and union representatives. The idea was that this groundfish development authority quota, this 10% of the overall quota, was to be distributed to joint vessel processor proposals designed to meet a certain series of objectives. Those objectives include market stabilization, maintaining the existing processing capacity, economic benefits, and a few others. But I've got to tell you, Corky might be very proud of the GDA, but it's a complete shambles. The largest processor recipient of GDA fish filed for bankruptcy protection shortly after receiving 50% of the GDA quota.

The GDA has failed to meet any of its objectives. In fact, the results of the program have been the opposite of those objectives. No other west coast fishery lost a proportion of its fish when they went to IVQs. So once again we call for equality and that the GDA be scrapped and those fish be returned to the fishermen.

As I said, the troll fishery is in economic turmoil right now. The largest processor has filed for bankruptcy protection, and they're not just the largest processor in B.C.; they also represent 25% of the catching capacity. They've gone bankrupt.

Licence fees have increased to the fishery by 2,000%. Increased fuel and operating costs, poor market conditions, and a multitude of petty regulations are killing our industry.

• 2000

Without economic viability in the fleet, the processing sector won't be able to operate. You're going to see further bankruptcies and even more jobs are going to be lost.

As little as ten years ago the troll fishery was a vibrant industry. Now it's on the verge of bankruptcy.

We need your help and support to return this fishery to one that provides a fair—not excessive, but fair—return to the catching sector.

Thank you.

The Vice-Chairman (Mr. Gary Lunn): Do we have Greg D'Avignon from the B.C. Salmon Farmers Association? No?

I'm going to go to Mike Forrest from the Pacific Gillnetters Association.

Mr. Mike Forrest (Director, Pacific Gillnetters Association): Yes, sir.

Would you all like to stand and shake a little bit and get used to it here? This is really tough for you. It's unbelievable. You've got a lot of stamina to put up with this.

My name is Mike Forrest. I'm a director of the Pacific Gillnetters Association. I've been there since its inception in 1977.

My discussion will not involve conservation and habitat measures. That is of utmost importance, but I believe many people are taking care of it. We will try our best to be part of that solution in the long term, as we have in the past.

I grew up and lived and worked on the Fraser River, as my grandfather and my father have done. I've fished all my life. I've been actively involved in fisheries management for about 20 years through the international Pacific salmon fisheries commission and presently the Fraser panel Pacific Salmon Commission. I am a fisherman. I fish a gillnet. I have been involved in the fishery throughout my life. I also have been pushed out of the fishery in the same way as you heard from Jim White and from various other fishers, native and non-native.

I've been part of the husbandry and the good stewardship, though. I'm proud to say that for sure the international Pacific salmon fish commission over time...a body that runs like the horsefly, at 1,000 fish spawners in 1941 to 2.6 million spawners in 1989.

There are very positive moves with respect to fish management on the west coast. The things that are happening here aren't all negative.

There is for sure a problem that Fred Fortier has eloquently put to you regarding coho, and we stand to be part of the solution to that, not further degrading that position.

Though more fish would solve most problems, better management practices for the existing stocks for future growth as well as the present catch are attainable in the short term. The following is a short list of issues.

The most singularly important item that is the worst item that I have ever seen come across my plate as a fisherman is the aboriginal fishing strategy pilot sales on the west coast. For the fishing community—and I am part of it—this is the most divisive policy that has ever been delivered by DFO. It is a segregated commercial fishery where access to the resource is based on race, and to me as a Canadian that is wrong in Canada.

You've heard everyone around the place here commenting on it. You've heard aboriginal people commenting that pilot sales are a bad process. It's got to be fixed. Preferably, it's got to be stopped. The only person who was looking into it here, Mr. Howe Street Matkin, and his inquiry, of course didn't even suggest the stopping of it. He suggested the instituting of a fourth user group, of all stupid things.

There are three pilot sales agreements on the south coast. There are many details, but the most glaring one is double dipping. I'm sure that as parliamentarians you understand what double dipping is, because we've heard lots about it in the press.

Aboriginal commercial fishers decide on their fishing plan, take a day or two to fish. Then the same commercial vessel goes fishing with me and the rest of the commercial fishery in the all-Canadian fishery. That's called double dipping. If they haven't caught enough yet, then they have a chance to go with another fish permit called a set net and they can have a triple dip if they choose to.

The fishery is different from the constitutionally protected section 35 fishery for food and ceremonial purposes, of which I'm sure you're fairly aware.

• 2005

Recently federal and provincial governments refer to aboriginal fisheries and they slur them, as if they were all constitutionally protected. They are not. Please be aware, the pilot sales fishery is not a constitutionally protected fishery. It is a racially segregated, aboriginal-only commercial fishery.

You have to understand the feeling of the fishing people involved in watching this process. You need to know what the apartheid policy is doing to our fishing communities. We used to fish all together, commercial and aboriginal fishers all together, and the aboriginal fishing community did as well as or better than most. Now DFO policy divides us. It divides us on the shore, it divides us in the fishery. Sharing is required, but AFS pilot sales programs divide us.

Throughout the season the Fraser River non-aboriginal commercial fishers, such as myself, are required to tie to the dock while aboriginal and commercial fishers catch and sell what once was part of the all-Canadian commercial allocation. In 1997 this allocation continues to be gratutiously transferred to a new user group, without compensation.

I can go into compensation at length. We could have great arguments about compensation. It hasn't happened. In the early 1970s we had something like a 300,000 catch in the aboriginal fishery in the Fraser. Now it's in excess of a million. It's non-compensated. People will argue that for 100,000 or 200,000 it was compensated.

Dr. Art May and many before him have focused on a basic truth—and you'll see it in the May report, and I hope you get a chance to read it—and it is that payment negotiated for aboriginal treaties must come from all Canadians, not from one segment of society; that is, not from my fishery or anybody else's individual commercial fishery.

DFO has said it's proceeding in the direction of future treaties. That's to make it sound really good. The problem is that they are proceeding under the misguided assumption that they know what the contents of the future treaties are. Until now they have been making those payments with my livelihood. This has to stop.

The issue is the main reason for the recent Mifflin plan, if you followed the process from Mr. Tobin's round table. I was part of that for a year.

There is a solution. It's not all negative. There is a solution, and it is generally agreed to coast-wide, including the native community in many areas. The industrial compromise allows for the Government of Canada to buy commercial vessels on the open market and transfer those licences to aboriginal fishers, if required. These vessels participate in the standard commercial fishery, as other Canadians do. There is no commercial, racially segregated, separate-time fishery. Aboriginal participation and economic benefit increase. No more licence or fishing pressure on the resource is instituted. Fisheries management is less complicated. Section 35 fisheries continue. The people of Canada pay the bill, not just the commercial fishery. This is a deliverable compromise.

Next item, the Mifflin plan. Like it or not, we have it here. Promises were made to the fleet about our security of access to the resource, upon which economic decisions have now been made. Our security of access to the resource has not yet been delivered, but it seems allowances are contemplated by the minister to have some fleets either cross into other persons' areas or take allocation that would be caught in another area.

DFO must realize that if it starts this process, the whole area licence plan will come unglued. Maybe you don't like it or maybe you would prefer it to come unglued, but it will for sure. DFO must stick to its plan for the required four-year term with which we started the plan. Then we'll look at it. Then if changes are needed, consult industry and make the adjustments. We need stability in our industry, and it must start from DFO assurances that they will not change the goalposts.

Fisheries management. Most resource managers agree less risk of overfishing of salmon is possible when you know and can control the catch of certain fish stocks and fish groups. It's also agreed that this is best accomplished with salmon having fisheries as close as possible to the river of origin, as Fred Fortier has referred to.

Recently DFO has coined the term “risk averse” for this management concept. Because area licensing limits the fleet in an area, the catch of that area has some limits, therefore it is more risk averse. But now DFO is planning an opposite approach for some fisheries and taking a backward step in allowing more offshore and mixed-stock fisheries. This is a complete reversal of present policy and recent past policy and poses an undue risk to resource management.

• 2010

Community management of coastal stocks is maybe a possibility. You might be able to deliver reasonably good community management and do something with coastal stocks in a local area, but you cannot manage passing stocks from coastal communities. You have to have a central authority somewhere—I would suggest the government, or it is going to be the Pacific Salmon Treaty—whereby you manage the stocks for the whole coast. You don't manage them from some coastal community. A passing stock cannot be done that way; you'll overfish it without knowing what you're fishing.

West coast decisions and the Pacific region: To get the west coast fishing communities to be partners.... As our chief suggested earlier, we're now to be partners.

DFO's new partnership concept: Fishers must be confident in west coast issues, have solutions born and delivered in the Pacific region, not in Ottawa. Have you heard that before?

West coast commercial allocation concerns must be handled on the west coast by the Commercial Fishing Industry Committee—which, if you haven't heard about it, is here. We have allocation issues, for sure. If there are some, CFIC is the table where they must be handled. We should not be end-running the process and lobbying the minister.

We now need Minister Anderson to reinforce this concept by sending would-be lobbyists back to the CFIC table—and it was effectively done by Minister Tobin—and not to undermine the process by making unilateral decisions from the minister's bench without consultation with CFIC. There must be one manager of the resource, not two or three. For the federal government to do its job, we need the Pacific region to have and demonstrate authority in delivering local solutions.

Both the provincial government and other stakeholders are a vital part of this process and need to be actively involved in it, but federal control of Pacific fisheries will not be successful unless we deliver made-in-west-coast solutions.

Art May and Sam Toy: There's absolutely no point in discussion of allocations among three sectors—aboriginal, commercial and recreational—if one of the sectors is allowed to proceed to fish under different rules than are the others. Minister Tobin's independent adviser, Dr. Art May, was supposed to deliver security of access to the resource, the basis of the Mifflin plan, by establishing initial allocations and transfer rules for all three user groups. He sidestepped the issue of aboriginal allocation and has left it to Sam Toy. That's not good enough.

The aboriginal and commercial fisheries should be a part of the all-Canadian commercial fishery, but if it continues to exist on its own, it must do so under the same rules as those for everybody else. This does not apply to section 35 fisheries because pilot sales are not under section 35 fisheries.

Pacific Salmon Treaty: The recent Strangway-Ruckelshaus report has some vindication for the historical Canadian position. DFO must quickly, while the report is fresh, respond in a positive way. We must maintain and reinforce the support for the excellent work of our Canadian chief negotiator, Yves Fortier. We require his expertise and in-depth knowledge at the Canadian table so that someone who is up to speed on the subject can get on with the job.

Thank you for this opportunity. We'll be glad to be part of the solution.

The Vice-Chairman (Mr. Gary Lunn): Thank you.

We have five speakers from the Community Fisheries Development Centre because they have five centres. I spoke with Frank Cox from their head centre, who said they're going to combine it all into just 10 minutes. Then I understand we're going to stand up and stretch for a few minutes. They have a boat they want us to go out to see, and that will give us an opportunity to stand up for five minutes.

There is a break in this schedule. We're not going to break; we're going to keep pushing forward so we can hear as many people as possible.

Mr. Cox, would you come forward with your group.

Ms. Brenda Kuecks (Community Fisheries Development Centre): I will be doing the presentation on behalf of Community Fisheries Development Centre.

We were actually hoping to give you a little bit of a break. We know everyone must be feeling a little brain dead at this point and the difference between a riffle and a pool and a packing licence and a corporate control issue must be starting to put a blur in your minds. So we were going to do a little bit of theatre, and the RCMP were a little bit nervous that we were going to do a little bit of theatre. We actually have a replica of a boat just outside the door, and if the committee would like a couple of minutes to stretch, we would like you to go out and have a look at the boat and then come back in. Then we'll talk about what it's about.

The Vice-Chairman (Mr. Gary Lunn): Sure. So we'll come back in three minutes.

• 2014

• 2019

The Vice-Chairman (Mr. Gary Lunn): Order. We're going to give the CFDC 10 minutes.

• 2020

The Chairman: I wonder if we could come to order, please.

Ms. Brenda Kuecks: The dory you saw outside represents what we hope are some ideas for what can happen now that the federal fisheries policy has had such a devastating impact on coastal communities. You've heard over the last two days, and you will hear over the next few days, personal stories from people who've been impacted by federal fisheries policies and will continue to be impacted by federal fisheries policies for, we anticipate, at least the next three to five years.

That dory outside was constructed.... I think you may have heard—I was late for the presentation going on out there—that it's an exact replica of a dory that used to be used on the west coast for long-line halibut fishing, for jigging. As a dory, represented as a boat, it probably doesn't mean very much, but what it means to the people who built it is a story in and of itself.

With the help of Human Resources Development Canada programming in the spring, the Community Fisheries Development Centre was able to assist almost 2,000 people who had been displaced from fishing through short-term job creation projects. That was one of those projects, and it wasn't just a chance for people to learn how to build a dory; it was a chance for people to come together and really understand what had happened to them, why it had happened to them, and what the long-term implications were going to be for them as individuals.

Since that time the Community Fisheries Development Centre has been working, with the help of HRDC and the province, in about 15 coastal communities. We work with native and non-native groups. We work with local governments. We work with sports and commercial fisheries' folks. We're trying to identify new employment opportunities that can replace what's being lost in the west coast fishery. We're not presuming that the fishery is dead. Much of our strategy and the strategy of those coastal communities is directly tied to trying to put fishermen to work on a full-time or part-time basis in activities that will actually revitalize the fishery—habitat renewal, inventory and stock assessment, and monitoring activities.

We're also looking at how to create new employment opportunities that will use the incredible skills of this constituency in ways that they've never been used before. If our dream is to come true, that dory, along with a number of others that were restored last spring, will be part of a coast-wide eco-tourism program over the next couple of years that will actually see fishermen working on those boats and providing tours to people that are based on teaching the history of the fishing industry. Fishermen are really excited about it, we're really excited about it, and coastal communities are really excited about it.

The federal government, through HRDC, provided us with a start in this transition program. When the Mifflin plan was tabled, there was a recognition, first of all—and I think you're hearing some of these stories now—that there was going to be serious displacement as a result of the federal policies that were coming in, and there was a commitment on behalf of the federal government to work with B.C. to do something about a long-term transition plan.

I know the numbers have been bandied back and forth about who's done what to whom and who's paid what for whom. The way we see it at the level of the coastal communities, there has been a really good start made. There are structures now in place. There is good dialogue going on in coastal communities between key players. There are about 60 excellent ideas, such as the eco-tourism idea, that are in various stages of development to create new employment and to diversify local economies.

We really need to have an ongoing recognition at the level of the federal government that there needs to be a transition plan in place. That transition plan needs to be planned well and coordinated between all of the various delivery agencies.

We've provided a brief to the standing committee, and I would very quickly like to go over the recommendations in that brief.

• 2025

The first recommendation is to recognize that if the federal government is going to use HRDC as your transition vehicle, then the existing programs and the existing eligibility criteria within HRDC are not sufficient to address this constituency. We have about a 40% fall-off rate with people who are no longer eligible for EI and are therefore no longer eligible to access any of the training or development programs that could otherwise assist them to supplement their income or to move out of fishing altogether if that were their choice. So there really needs to be a hard look first of all at the transition vehicle the federal government wants to employ in this situation, and if the decision is that it's HRDC, then there needs to be a really serious review of the policy set which limits the eligibility of people for those programs.

The transitional jobs fund, which we have been assured is the best federal vehicle, through HRD, for building a transition program for the fishing community, has proved to be incredibly cumbersome. Our two experiences so far have been really long and really difficult. We would urge an extension of the transitional jobs fund and a review of the criteria that can be used in deploying that fund for transition programming for the fishery.

The final recommendation I would like to draw to your attention is that there really does need to be a review of the small business development fund that is available for people in the fishing community. Right now there is a legacy fund sitting with the Community Futures Development Centre. The stacking program was then converted at the end of November to what they call a “legacy fund”, which was supposed to be available for small business development for the fishery. In fact, that fund as it currently sits is very inaccessible to fishermen. If that's the vehicle the federal government chooses to use for small business development support to this constituency, there needs to be a review of that fund.

That having been said, a number of people following me would like to talk about their personal experiences with transition programming.

Ms. Diane Gordon (Community Fisheries Development Centre—Richmond): I'm Diane Gordon, the project coordinator for the unemployment assistance program here in Steveston.

I'm not a member of the fishing community. I've no history here other than the year I've spent in Steveston working with displaced fishing industry workers. One of the things I have noticed is that it's a great pleasure working with the people and it's a great frustration working within the programs and the policies of HRDC to be able to serve the client base we have here in Steveston, in the fishing village.

It's not that the HRDC's programs are not well thought out and it's not that they don't contribute to a person's success. I'm going to introduce José to you, who is one of their successes. It's just that they are not applicable to enough people.

In the Richmond HRDC catchment area there are 160,000 people, and 25% of the EI claims in this catchment area are fishing industry-related claims. The number is there. It may look around around 3,500. Of those, some people will go back into the fishing industry, some will not. Those are the people who actually qualify.

We know 17% of the people we see coming through our office have not qualified for EI this year. We have another 20% of them we classify as CRFs and I classify as SOL because there's nothing we can do for them.

I don't really want to bore you with statistics. There are a lot you can collect. What we have and what we see with people coming through our office is that the numbers we can actually help do very well. The programs and services are very well constructed. We can work with them, and that's fine. It's the people we can't help that it's so hard to deal with.

• 2030

I'm going to give you one example of some human devastation. I was doing the adjustment services program when B.C. Packers amalgamated with a Canadian fish company. There was a fellow there, a 33-year veteran, working at the plant. He wasn't old enough to collect his old age pension. What do you do with somebody that's 58 and has worked in the fishing industry almost since he began walking? Do you retrain him, put him back on the job at an entry level wage? It's humiliating for him. His wife came to me one day and said, “Diane, you've got to do something for him. You've got to get him out of the house. Give him something to do”.

It creates huge problems within families when you can't give these people access to something that maintains their dignity.

We also have a large population of visible minorities, and they flourished within the fishing industry. Now, when it's come time and they can't make their money in the fishing industry, they're losing it. They need a long-term strategy. They need ESL; they need high school upgrading; they need some kind of training program. Some of these interventions are going to take three years. Are we going to be around long enough to see these people through? Are they going to be able to do these interventions? Are they going to be able to take jobs that don't provide them with a living wage and then we'll be relegating them to employed poverty?

If you look around Steveston you'll see what remains of a vibrant fishing community. If you look a little bit more closely you'll see closed processing plants, boats for sale, and if you look even more closely you'll see people who are living on those boats but not telling anyone, because they've lost their homes.

An HRDC official told me the other day that they're noticing a trend in the fishing industry. People are moving out of Richmond, they're moving away from the ocean, they're moving up into the valley, because it's too expensive to live here and they're not making enough money to live in the community where they work.

Good program outlines exist today that will work for people if they can have access to them. I recommend that the eligibility criteria for these programs and services that are now available through HRDC be expanded to include a wider range of people who are on both EI and income assistance, that each HRDC area operate from the same guidelines for all fishing industry workers, that a co-ordinated strategy be undertaken that includes fisheries renewal and economic development, and that we ensure that the tools and measures created address a long term strategy so fishing industry workers who have to transition out of the industry can do so with dignity.

I'm going to introduce you to Jose. He's done it well.

Mr. Jose Galang (Community Fisheries Development Centre): Thank you.

My name is Jose Galang. I don't know who you guys are. This is my first time to speak. I don't know you. Are you government delegates? I don't know. Anyway, my schooling will come up here.

I used to work at a cannery here at B.C. Packers, but they closed it down. Fortunately, our union, which is the UFAWU, came up with a program that is a job creation project. I'm very fortunate to learn several skills that I never learned before. One of them is painting and another is janitorial work. I would have loved to learn how to build boats so maybe I could sell them or something.

Anyway, as I did that I also was still kind of lost on what I was supposed to do after losing my job. So I went to the centre where Diane works and I asked where I could find schooling.

The first thing I did was go to Career Drive, where the group helped me focus on what I want to do. From there I started my little window washing company, in which today I employ five people.

Even then I still wasn't making the money that I wanted. Before my grandmother died, I told her that by the time I'm 30 I should be a millionaire. I'm 32 and I'm quite behind.

• 2035

From learning my little business I'm still not capturing the market that I want to have. So I went back and asked for more education in business, where I can learn how to make my own business plan, a little bit of marketing skills, salesmanship. That's what I'm getting right now, as well as a little bit on computers.

I learned how to capture. I'm probably going to be competing with a large cleaning and janitorial business, and hopefully I'll be a millionaire some day.

Thank you.

The Vice-Chairman (Mr. Gary Lunn): Thank you very much.

A voice: Somebody else, the same organization.

The Vice-Chairman (Mr. Gary Lunn): Is this the same, from the CFDC?

A voice: Yes.

Mr. Ross Watzel (Program Manager, Community Fisheries Development Centre—Surrey): My name is Ross Watzel, and I think most of my time just got burnt up. That's a tough act to follow.

The Vice-Chairman (Mr. Gary Lunn): We'll give you a few more minutes here.

Mr. Ross Watzel: Thank you.

I'm going to pass around a folder. I had a prepared text that I was going to read to you, but you can read it later. In this folder you'll find our official brief.

I'm the program manager for the Surrey office of the Community Fisheries Development Centre. My program is a retraining program concentrating on habitat restoration projects. I was also a gillnet panel member on the round table.

I'm not going to read you this. You can read it later.

In this folder you'll find an analysis of the survey of the salmon gillnet fleet rationalization questionnaire.

When I was on the round table I insisted, when they were making up the questionnaire, that they include space for fish industry people to write down their comments. I promised them that if they did I would ensure that those comments would be dealt with. The Department of Fisheries and Oceans completely ignored them, so at my own expense I had them typed up and an analysis done of them. I'd like you to look at them. The analysis is black and white.

I'll give you this one copy of the comments. There are over 1,000 comments. Maybe you could make copies and pass them out. The black and white doesn't really tell the story, but what you'll read in here is what you are hearing in this room.

I've been in the fishing industry since 1958. I started out as a deckhand on a boat in the Rivers Inlet area. Right now we're down to a two-river system, but when I started fishing, Rivers Inlet was a very important area for the industry. We spent at least a month of every year up there fishing. Because of habitat degradation, we don't fish there now. There is a small contingent of people going up there now to do some assessment work. I'd like to see a big commitment from government for funding to do the remedial work that is needed up there.

Rivers Inlet is as important to the people of this industry as the Fraser River or the Skeena River. It's where families would go. The whole family would go up there. When you went up to the inlet in your boat, you would see kids and dogs and diapers all over the rigging in the boats there. Families bonded up there. It was a way of life, but that way of life has been taken away from us through logging and other habitat degradation.

I've put about 70 displaced fish industry workers through my retraining program. They're finding meaningful work. They're well trained, but they don't have bachelor of science degrees behind their names. Mifflin said that he would do whatever it took to restore the industry and restore the resource, so we're training the people. We're doing our part, but he has to make a commitment to these people that once they're trained they'll be hired. All these programs that are set up are designed for the higher university graduates and scientists and so on, but the people we're training know a lot more about the resource. It's closer to their hearts than it is to the heart of a graduate from university.

We can do the work. All we need are the tools to do it.

Thank you.

• 2040

The Chairman: Before we go on to another speaker, I wonder if one of the previous three speakers could come back to the microphone for just a second and tell the committee exactly what the eligibility criteria should be in your estimation, what the eligibility criteria could be in the best of circumstances. What would be the best possible scenario for the eligibility criteria?

Secondly, could one of the interveners answer the question of the transitional job fund? What exactly do you object to as far as the fund is concerned? What exactly should be done to change it?

Ms. Diane Gordon: Right now the eligibility criteria for HRDC programs include people who are currently collecting employment insurance and people who are what they call reach-back clients, which means that they have collected employment insurance within the last three years, or within the last five years if it is for paternity or maternity leave.

What we would look for are people who have not collected UI. If you have been a successful fisherman or if you have been successful at what you are doing and you continue to work, why would you ever collect UI? We want to be able to help these people.

We also want to help the people who have not worked enough and over the years have possibly been supported by their husbands, possibly supported by their wives. We want to help them transition out of the industry. We want to be able to help more of the young people.

We also want to be able to help people who have lost their homes, lost their boats, and ended up on income assistance. It is very hard for us to estimate how many people those are, because we don't see them. They don't come to us and sometimes they don't admit to us exactly what it is.

So we would like to see the criteria broadened to include all of these groups, the major criterion being the interest and enthusiasm of the candidate and the capability for them to undertake the training program.

The Vice-Chairman (Mr. Gary Lunn): Thank you.

Ms. Brenda Kuecks: I will answer that transitional jobs fund question. My name is Brenda Kuecks and I am with Community Fisheries.

We have been told by HRDC regionally and by Mr. Nault when he visited here that the traditional jobs fund was the best vehicle that we could use to assist people who were displaced from fishing. This was specifically because we were making the case that many people in the fishing industry were not eligible for EI programs. The suggestion was that the traditional jobs fund could be used by people who were not eligible for EI, that we could put together an employment package for people who were not eligible for EI. So it was the best vehicle for us to use.

What we found in actually testing the transitional jobs fund for this work is that it states very clearly in the criteria for the traditional jobs fund that it is to be used only for long term sustainable employment.

We are in the process of creating new employment opportunities: ecotourism, inventory and mapping work, all fisheries renewal activities. These are all pieces of work where people are being trained for new and emerging industries and for contractual labour on a part-time basis in the off-season.

The transitional jobs fund criteria do not allow us to prepare any of those people for work.

The Vice-Chairman (Mr. Gary Lunn): How many more do you have?

A voice: We have one more in this part.

The Vice-Chairman (Mr. Gary Lunn): Keep it down to a minute or so. We have been going about twice the amount of time here. We won't cut you off. We are here to listen.

Mr. Serge Cartier (Community Fisheries Development Centre): Thanks. I am glad you people are here. Thank you for coming down and for listening to our problems.

I am 55 years old and have been in the industry for 33 years or more. I have been in the industry since Roméo LeBlanc was there in New Brunswick. I came back here 26 years ago and am still in the industry.

Over the last couple of years, I have had probably 70 days of work as a tenderman. By the way, probably most of you don't know what a tenderman is. When I was in Ottawa talking to the Mifflin plan, which we saw in this document, he did not even know what a tenderman is. So don't feel bad. He should have known.

• 2045

In the meantime, here I have all these days when nothing is happening. If it hadn't been for the HRD program...those people really helped me out. I had never done a resume in my whole life, to tell you the truth, because I have fished. From one place to another, people knew what you were like with your jobs.

The HRD helped me. I'm going to school. I just finished one term at Douglas College, and at age 55 being a student in a college is pretty scary. I'm probably going to finish at the end of March. I've already got a job with the Ministry of Social Services, with mentally handicapped kids. The course I'm taking is ASL, which is American sign language. If it hadn't been for that, I would have nothing.

I will tell you, it's pathetic when you have to go to welfare. That's one thing I've never done and I don't intend to start now at my age.

So I'm really thankful to these people. Not only did it create a job for me, but it creates jobs for them too, by helping us. They know the ins and outs of how to do things. They know how to use computers and I don't. So I'm thankful we have them. This money is well spent when you put it in programs like this—not welfare. Welfare doesn't bring anything.

The salmon thing.... If you take a little fish and put it in the river, you can do something four years down the road. My grandchildren will see some fish and maybe I'll have a chance to see that, but when you're logging and you plant a tree, it will be 30 years down the road before you can cut that tree. I won't be around to see that tree being cut, but I can see the salmon coming on.

The Vice-Chairman (Mr. Gary Lunn): Thank you very much, Mr. Cartier. There's one more.

Mr. Peter Sainas (Employment Counsellor, Canadian Fisheries Development Centre): Good evening. I'm an employment counsellor with the CFDC in Vancouver. I was in the fishing industry for over 30 years. I was a shore worker, I was a tenderman, and I've fished as well.

A few years ago I realized I wasn't making any money. I couldn't survive on the amount of fishing time I was being given, so I decided to get out and retrain myself. I went back to school and got a job with CFDC as an employment counsellor. So here I am now trying to help these people.

We see a lot of people who are not eligible for EI. They're on welfare. We see a lot of people with ESL problems, and we see a lot of people with a lack of formal education because they've never had to go to school; they could make a living fishing. They can't do that any more. These people need help.

We would welcome all the support we can get from you to help these people become productive workers.

Thank you.

The Vice-Chairman (Mr. Gary Lunn): Thank you very much.

I'm going to go to the United Fishermen and Allied Workers Union. We have them down twice with two speakers. I'd ask both John Radosevic and Jim Sinclair to come up and see what we can do here.

Mr. John Radosevic (President, United Fishermen and Allied Workers Union): In the interests of time, Mr. Chairman, we'll just have one person make the presentation today, and I'll try to keep it well under 10 minutes in total for both of us.

I'm the president of the United Fishermen and Allied Workers Union, CAW. The first request I have, really, on behalf of our members, is that we be given an opportunity to be before your committee, whether here or in Ottawa, to deal in more depth with some of the issues I'm going to deal with very briefly in the paper we've handed out.

We've heard a lot today about a lot of different subjects. I would like to start by saying that it's not just the pieces of the puzzle that we need to address; it's the fact that the foundations of DFO and the way we're managing the fishery are shaky and they need repair. We're putting all these ideas forward on the basis that we have a manageable fishery, a competent department of fisheries, with a vision and some kind of scope to get us from where we are today to some kind of economic viability in the future. I don't think it's so. I think you go right to the basics and you deal with what we're seeing in the Department of Fisheries today.

• 2050

Turn it back to the 1980s. In the 1980s you saw the federal government commitment to things such as common property fisheries, enhancement, stock renewal, enforcement, science, a diversified fleet, providing sustenance to all kinds of coastal communities.

Today, what do we see in comparison? What we see in comparison is DFO abandoning common property fisheries, as was talked about earlier, to special-interest groups, privatization, an uncontrolled fleet. And I say uncontrolled because we're not talking about fleet reduction per se. We've all agreed there has to be some kind of fleet reduction. Methods of getting there have been through either area licensing or ITQs, which have driven the industry into whole rounds of licence speculation in some fisheries. More money is made on the rental of that privilege to fish which people get from the Department of Fisheries than is made on the fishery itself.

Independent owners are being driven out of the industry by unfair licence practices. Coastal communities are in serious trouble in some areas of this province.

That's the picture. If you dig through all the material, the bottom line is that there are really two visions for this industry. We have what we're calling Ottawa's corporate view, or corporate-oriented view, and then there are the rest of us. We're here to tell the committee that in our estimation Ottawa's vision lacks scope; that it's necessary to develop the fishery to the full potential it really has.

The primary focus in Ottawa is on how to reduce the fleet at no cost to government; how to reduce costs in general. It's a bean counter's mentality. It's cost-cutting to a fault.

It's a perfect fit for the corporate agenda. You don't have to take my word for it. Go to the things Mike Hunter has said in publications and so on; it's an easy formula: a small fleet delivering a lot of volume per unit at cheap prices, in order to cause the companies not to have to invest in new ways of marketing, new production, value-added; so they can do the same things they have been doing for the last hundred years without change. In that agenda, enhancement and stock rebuilding don't play a part.

Neither do employment objectives. There is no room for coastal community economics in that vision, or for survival of independent boat operators. You heard a lot about that today. They are a dying breed, and it's getting worse, not better. Industrial and resource renewal...all of those things don't fit.

We have a different view. That's not our vision; that's their vision. In our vision, those things are important. We have to have some kind of job target. It doesn't mean we save every job and we don't reduce the fleet, or we don't tailor the fleet, or any of those things. It means we have to have a target for the use of Canada's public resource, pure and simple. That means people who work in the industry as well as people who own the boats.

It's important that Ottawa stop hitting this industry, and you fill in the blanks, with either costs or changes; the flavour of the week. We don't know whether we're coming or going. There is no security of access. Those things cannot be a sound foundation for a healthy industry.

The Fisheries Act? I want the committee to pay a lot of attention to that. It has very significant impacts on the public access to the resource. And I include the fishing industry participants in that, in the sense that they are public—their access comes through licensing—but the entire public access to the resource is being challenged by those changes to the Fisheries Act. We've outlined what we mean in more detail in the brief.

The Mifflin plan. I'm not going to say much about that, except that it promised a number of things it hasn't delivered. It promised sustainability, it promised manageability, and it promised viability. What has it delivered? I am not going to go through a lot of details—some of you have heard it before—but it promised viability. Let's look at that as an example.

This year, according to DFO's numbers, the average gillnetter in area C made about $8,000, or maybe a little more. It was about $15,000 in area D, and about $15,000 or $16,000 in area E.

• 2055

Just by way of comparison, because you heard Mr. Anderson stand up here and tell you that the people who are left in the industry are better off because they're catching a third more fish, let me give you the comparison numbers. In 1993, which was the last cycle year for this particular run, the dollar number was the same. In other words, the fish companies were paying fishermen approximately the same amount. There were about 30% more boats in the industry and the average was about $23,000. That's prosperity.

Voices: Hear, hear!

Mr. John Radosevic: We need to review where DFO is going. The Mifflin plan promised a review before a vote was even talked about. They're now putting the vote ahead of the review, so people are voting in a vacuum.

I'm not going to go into detail about that. I say the important thing is that we need a review and you need to be part of it. This committee needs to be part of it. We need you to help us lead this industry out of the problems it has. We need your help politically. We need your brain power, your connections in Parliament. We need people to help us do the job that needs to be done here.

So I hope you get involved, that you deal with some of these things in the brief we put to you, that you get us back there if you need us to help you understand a little bit more where we're going.

In the meantime, transition and renewal have to be seen as one and the same thing. They're linked. We have what the east coast can only dream about. Everybody is on about TAGS this and TAGS that and all the problems and everything else. The fact of the matter is that unlike cod, we have habitat in British Columbia, fisheries habitat that can be rebuilt. In four years' time the fish will be back. You can't do that on the east coast. It seems to us that it's crying out for the kind of investment in the future that DFO, if they were visionary, could have instead of looking at the cost cutting to the exclusion of all else that could be good.

We have an underutilized fishery workforce. We have related industries in habitat renewal that we could be developing, research and development. We could be the envy of the world in this fishery, and I think that transitional jobs and long-term training programs are the answer. It fits a market with the need to do the work. If people want fish to be developed, there are people who want to develop fish. Why can't we put them together? You've heard some of the people earlier on talking about that.

But I want to make a point here. On November 27, 1996, Fred Mifflin said:

Earlier this month I said the federal government was prepared to spend $30 million or whatever it takes to give immediate short-term help to fishery workers. I meant it then and I mean it now. We are prepared to do whatever is necessary.

No one could have asked for a clearer commitment than that.

Minister Anderson, in press releases and comments, will say that he spent anywhere from $136 million to $200 million, that he's fulfilled the commitment and that he doesn't owe any more commitment to this industry. In our view, that is totally incorrect. And you'll see in our brief, appendix A, that in fact less than $25 million was spent on any kind of aid program for people in the industry, in the short term to deal with the immediate side effects of the Mifflin plan and some of the other things that were going on in the industry and almost nothing for any long-term training, transitional programs or anything like that.

Our calls for transitional strategies go unanswered. We don't know where Ottawa is going. We appeal to you for assistance in trying to find out, and we appeal to you for help in getting those things.

The kinds of things we're talking about are the building blocks of a healthy industry, which is what we all want. We don't want to see a TAGS program that doesn't produce something we need here. That's not to say that people in Newfoundland have to eat rocks. I think the TAGS program did some useful things. It fed people. What's wrong with that when it really comes down to it? We say we don't need a TAGS program, but we need something that's tailor-made to do what we need to do on this coast. We can do something that's very positive, for a whole bunch of reasons that we don't have time to go into.

Salmon treaty.... Obviously it's essential that we have the ability to utilize our own resource. The Strangway-Ruckelshaus report seems to sum it up. Aside from setting the record straight on the issue of the stakeholders' process—a process, incidentally, which never had the confidence of the people in this industry—the Strangway-Ruckelshaus report established some very important points. It established that a treaty was essential for conservation, and this was something the Americans were challenging. It established the need to preserve article 3, which is the equity principle, and it established that the United States is unfairly taking our fish.

• 2100

They can't ignore that any more. Look at the press and some of the reviews that you've heard with President Clinton, the Governor of Alaska and so on.

This is a positive report that we can build on. We can use the report to help repair the damage between Ottawa and the province, between Ottawa and the fishermen—and, believe you me, there has been a lot of damage to repair—and we can build a real Team Canada approach that was perhaps not possible before this report came out.

In the meantime—and again this is a recommendation that I hope the committee will really seriously consider and try to get that message across to the Department of Fisheries—it's essential that we accentuate the things in that Strangway-Ruckelshaus report that we need, and not publicly. We can focus on the compromises and talk about all the kinds of things in house, but publicly I don't think it's a very good bargaining strategy to start focusing in all the newspapers on all of the things we're going to have to do and compromise on in order to get this treaty before we even get to the negotiating table.

We don't say we can't compromise. We don't say we don't bargain in good faith. But what are we doing here when we're giving it away in the newspapers before we get to the table? That's what Louis Tousignant did last year when, before we got into the negotiations around the Canada-U.S. treaty, he went out publicly and told the Americans that it didn't matter what they did, Canada wouldn't intercept coho going through Canadian waters and into the Americans' waters.

It's not to say that we would have hit on coho that was being endangered. But what kind of bargaining strategy does that entail?

You wonder why people look a little bit crazy out west when you look at us from Ottawa and wonder why everybody's going nuts here. It's because nothing makes sense to us any more. None of it makes sense.

Our emphasis for the foreseeable future is that David Anderson has to come to British Columbia. He has to work out some kind of an alliance with the province, with the fishermen in coastal communities, with the public of British Columbia, who are really interested in seeing a fair treaty for the province.

We also have to see, as point two, Prime Minister Chrétien put this at the top of his diplomatic agenda.

We also want to see federal support for the provincial legal case, and federal support for the fishermen, who did nothing this summer except try to defend themselves and their country from attacks by Americans, which the Strangway and Ruckelshaus process has now clearly identified beyond any doubt.

I appeal to you to look at the attached paper on multilateral investment. Under the new multilateral agreement on investment the protocol says basically that all countries must have the same access to fisheries licences, quotas, permits. Norway is already taking steps to protect itself from those kinds of incursions on its sovereignty. Our recommendation to this committee and to the Minister of Fisheries is that we start to take those same steps now, quickly, before we find ourselves completely invaded.

It's not just the Americans we're talking about here; it's anybody who is part of the multilateral agreement on investment who can come in here and take over our licences, quotas, permits and anything else.

If Norway is doing it and other countries are looking at it, we surely should be doing that. Yet we talk to Ottawa about that and nobody seems to know anything about it. We're sitting here thinking, well, who is protecting, who is speaking for our industry?

In conclusion, we say that with a responsible approach from Ottawa we have great potential. We are not a sunset industry. We could be a magnificent sunrise industry. You start to talk about the basics and the vision of where Ottawa is going compared to where it could go, and then all of a sudden it starts to make sense, our comments when we say there should be an investment in the future. That's the attitude. Rather than seeing everything as a cost, those things start to make sense.

We need a viable fishery, we need democratic control over the forces that are affecting our lives, we need independent fishermen to be able to survive, and DFO has to be more accountable to that vision if it's going to work.

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Finally, I want to say once more that we would appeal to you to consider having some of us back to Ottawa when you get into more detailed discussions on some of these issues.

I appreciate the time.

The Vice-Chairman (Mr. Gary Lunn): We now have Richard Gray, who I skipped over, thinking that he was part of the CFDC.

My apologies for skipping you. That was an error by the clerk behind me. I'd never accept responsibility.

Mr. Richard Gray (Individual Presentation): I'd like to thank the committee for the opportunity to speak.

I'd like to clarify one thing. I have several hats, but the CFDC hat is not the one I'm wearing right now. I'm speaking to you as a round table panel member. I was part of the process, and I was representing the non-licence holders or the crew. All through the process, I guess I was referred to as the “voice in the wilderness”, because with all the high stakes and the important issues we had to deal with, somehow the little guy always gets lost. My job was to keep reminding everybody and I did the best I could to do that. Suffice it to say that through three fisheries ministers, from Mr. Tobin to Mr. Mifflin and now to Mr. Anderson, somewhere along the line the message from the little guy has been lost.

I won't go into many of the details that have been covered already. I do have a submission I will give to the panel, which is basically the Pacific Policy Round Table report to the minister, dated December 1995. I've highlighted the pertinent sections and I just want to touch on a few of them briefly.

We've established here today from some of the previous speakers that the people who were displaced from the industry and put into transition have encountered...I hesitate to say cracks, it's more like canyons. Unfortunately, some of the best intentions, when put to practice when bureaucracy is involved, never really get to their goal, and I guess part of my duty as the person representing those non-licence-holders and crew people is to remind this panel of the commitments that were made and some of the recommendations that were made. Briefly, I'd like to go through just a couple of them. I'll do it just as quickly as possible.

On the same panel report, for the fleet management options, one of the areas of agreement from that particular panel was crew assistance in training to encourage core professional fleet and stable professional crews. In others words, if we're going to shrink this industry, the people who are left need to be professional, they need to be viable, they need support to become better at their craft, to become better fishermen better able to make a living.

In the scheme of our transition programs, which I am also involved in, that seems to have been lost. In Ottawa, through human resources and much of the bureaucracy, it appears that there's no room to retrain a fisherman to stay a fisherman. Retraining means you have to leave. Well, there are several different ways to become viable. It's either to become better at what you do, remaining in the fishing industry, or to become more skilled to do other lines of work in the off-season to supplement your fishing income. It's not to go onto welfare or onto unemployment insurance.

The areas of agreement from all the panels...and I can't stress this enough. As I was harping on this issue through the entire process, I was constantly told, Richard, don't worry, that's a given. If people, by the stroke of a pen, are moved out of their livelihood, we'll have to take care of them. We'll have to give them the means to transition out of this industry, maintain their dignity and become viable in another line of work. So I said, okay, fine, but it's still my job to remind everybody. All through this process that was never questioned. Nobody ever said that was not going to be a responsibility, including Mr. Tobin.

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One of the other areas of agreement from the panel was that crew assistance in training would be encouraged to core professionals, as I had mentioned earlier, and also—and this comes from Commissioner Peter Pearse, in his report on the Pacific fisheries policy—that the government bears much of the responsibility for the current economic problems facing the fishing industry due to poor licensing policies.

Implementation of a restructuring plan for the Pacific salmon fishery, based on the significant fleet reduction objective proposed, would result in about 1,500 vessels leaving the industry and the loss of about 3,500 jobs.

Well, those figures have been borne out. Those 3,000 jobs have been lost. The current system through HRDC, as was mentioned earlier, just doesn't do it. Giving people a 12-week job creation program to put income assistance in their pocket.... We dragged them out of the hole, left them hanging by their fingers, and walked away, and they have slipped back in. This is not the first time this has happened, and this is not what was promised to us as a result of the Pacific policy round table program. I urge you to bear in mind that we have a commitment to these people to see it through, see through the promises that were made to them.

With restructuring, including a buy-back, there would also be a transition assistance for displaced workers. Participants believe that adjustment assistance for individuals is crucial to ensuring that the skills and expertise of existing workers are not lost. We need to facilitate an orderly transition for industry participants, and it should be given first priority—I repeat, first priority—in taking part in activities related to industry renewal, such as habitat restoration, development projects, and production opportunities. This message seems to have been lost through three ministers. That's why I'm here today: to bring that message back to you. These people need to be a priority.

When the Mifflin dollars are disbursed, when fisheries renewal dollars are disbursed, it's very nice to be able to use them as a bit of a political tool. It's a feel-good thing: it's a good industry, it's a good thing to restore salmon; we should give a little to this group, a little to that group. You spread it so thin that by the time the final dollars get to the people it was really intended for there's not enough there. There's not enough really to do anything.

Crew members will require adjustment assistance in the form of retraining options, mobility assistance, employment assistance, and portable wage subsidies. Industry participants that stay should also be afforded a professionalization program to allow skills upgrading.

That seems to have been lost in the message. Not only do we have a group of people who are going to leave—involuntarily, I might add—but we also have a core group who want to stay and become professionals. I think the professionalization of our industry needs to be a priority as well.

I won't drag this on too much longer. I'm just going to cover a couple more points.

A program should be initiated whereby off-season and unemployed fishers and shore workers and other members of the public are trained in habitat restoration and fish production skills so as to undertake gainful, meaningful work to assist in the conservation of the fisheries resource.

Well, that's a great idea, and I think everybody buys into that. Everybody believes that with the funds and the will that will be allocated in the future, there are jobs there. But when I have my other hat on, when I'm dealing with Human Resources and Development Canada, they ask where the jobs are; they say those jobs don't exist. It's a Catch-22. If we get the support to train the people, there will be the jobs. They ask where have the jobs been?

There needs to be a coordinated effort here between Ottawa and the Department of Fisheries in British Columbia, and the province, to develop a strategy to move people through. We want to be the stewards of the resource, to plant the seeds, not just the harvesters. The people who have been displaced from the industry can actually be the ones who do the planting. By injecting more fish there's more for everybody, there's more viability, and a harvester in the past can be a steward or a sower.

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I'm going to conclude by saying that this may be the last of a very long process that I've been involved with. I want to make sure everybody understands that there are people here who, with the stroke of a pen, have lost a livelihood they've had for 30 years. They were proud people; they were productive people. They weren't welfare cases and they weren't habitual unemployment users. It's very difficult to have been a proud and contributing member of our society, with a long history in this industry, to lose access to the opportunity to make your living, and then a safety net is promised to you and it's not delivered.

I will leave this document with you. Please look at it. I had to take this last opportunity to basically hold the feet to the fire for the promises that were made to the non-licence-holders and people who really have no other voice.

I thank you for your time.

The Vice-Chairman (Mr. Gary Lunn): Do we have Mike Emes and Jim Stevens here from Salmon for Canada?

Mr. Mike Emes (Salmon for Canada Defence Committee): Good afternoon. I'm wearing a Salmon for Canada hat today. I'm a commercial fisherman. I'd like to start by introducing myself and say how long I've been in the industry.

First of all, I'm a third generation fisherman. My grandfather and my father were fishermen. My youngest son was attempting to stay in the fishery. In the past few years he looked at the commercial industry. We talked about it and he said it wasn't there for him. He was going to have to do something else. He was the type of young guy who enjoyed fishing. He didn't mind the weather and the hours and worked hard at it, and when he was in the industry he did very well at it. Now he's working in the oil rigs in Alberta.

In 27 years my wife and I raised two children and put them both through university.

I'm an area C licensed fisherman. The people before me said how much money they made, and I know exactly how much money I made. I made just over $10,000 last year. My hard costs for 1997, with the new net restrictions and stuff like that, were over $10,000. You can figure that out. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to know how much I've got in my pocket today.

I have a prepared statement. I think it's to be handed out. I don't know if you got it or not.

We thank the Standing Committee on Fisheries and Oceans for coming to British Columbia to give the stakeholders of the fishing industry a chance to voice the concerns and fears we have regarding the present state of the future of the fishing industry.

When the so-called Mifflin plan was introduced to British Columbia fishermen just over two years ago, the then Minister of Fisheries, Fred Mifflin, said that previously one area for fishing would now be two seine areas, three gillnet areas, and three troll areas. Each area would be a viable and sustainable fishery.

• 2120

Well, here we are in 1998, and a majority of the fishermen are worse off than ever before. The coastal communities have been devastated. We find ourselves needing to purchase another expensive licence in a doubtful industry to try to make a decent living.

The Mifflin plan is working for the large companies. I want to say that over again. The Mifflin plan is definitely working, but it's working for the people who wrote it, the large companies. They have gone from just over 50% of the catch of fish to almost 75% of the catch of fish today. The large companies can hire less crew for the same fleet, and they also save money by cutting back on their packing fleet, the tendermen people.

The Mifflin plan has eliminated a large number of vessels but in fact has done nothing for the fish. The Department of Fisheries and Oceans has still not been able to stop.... The main salmon problem for Canada here is the overfishing of Alaska fish. The Department of Fisheries and Oceans has not been able to stop Alaska from overfishing our salmon stocks. In response to last summer's overfishing by Alaska, the B.C. gillnetters were forced to stop fishing in the last week of July. The 1997 fishing season was the worst season I have ever had.

We need a treaty between Canada and the United States which works. We need a Minister of Fisheries who will fight for Canada, not someone who goes down to Washington, D.C. and says if the Alaskans do not stop overfishing the Canadians will have to cut their harvest in half.

An important part of the 1985 salmon treaty was the agreement between both countries that each country should benefit from the fish they nurture and raise in their own waters. Alaska has been ignoring this agreement, to the detriment of the Canadian fishermen and the B.C. salmon stocks. As was stated by Mr. Ruckelshaus and Mr. Strangway, rules must be established for the preservation of fish; and time is definitely not on the side of the fish.

No longer can the Minister of Fisheries, Minister David Anderson, say it's up to the stakeholders to come up with the solution. The stakeholders process does not work. With Alaska having first hit at the fish, unless they work with Canada in conservation efforts, all our efforts are useless.

In 1997 the Nass River was at 50% of target escapements. The Alaskans kept fishing after Canada had stopped.

If this trend is allowed to continue, it will not only eliminate the commercial fishing industry, it will also affect the sport fishing industry and all communities and industries supported by them. David Anderson and the federal government need to demand the Alaskans conserve their stocks. We need Alaska to live up to the 1985 treaty, which allows them to take 120,000 to 130,000 of our sockeye each year, not the 570,000 to 1,000,000 they took in 1997.

Our government needs to tell Alaska to withdraw their lawsuit against British Columbia fishermen so we can begin government-to-government negotiations with a clean slate. Allowing the lawsuit to continue is already hurting some British Columbia fishermen. They are not able to sell their boats named in the lawsuit. Northern fishermen were forced into the actions taken in Prince Rupert because they were frustrated by the Minister of Fisheries' unwillingness to confront the Alaskans on their overfishing and the federal mismanagement of our fisheries and licensing system. If we had not acted as we did last summer, the salmon issue would not have received the attention it is now getting and more fishermen would have gone bankrupt and been forgotten while the salmon issue continued to be ignored.

Thank you very much.

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The Vice-Chairman (Mr. Gary Lunn): Thank you.

We have Guy Dunston.

Mr. Guy Dunston (Sts'Wan Society): I'm from the interior, from Lytton, B.C. In my language it's called Nlaka'pamux.

I've heard quite a bit today, but I'd like to bring you guys even further back than just 1980 or thereabouts. Look back 100 years. It was a crime for a white man 100 years ago to catch a fish, because the government said it was ours. Something happened along the line somewhere. Things were reversed, and it ends up being the Indian from the interior who gets it when he catches a couple of fish.

A long time ago salmon was our currency. We used to barter and trade with it. I don't know what happened in the Supreme Court of Canada, but it's certainly not the supreme court of the Nlaka'pamux people or the interior tribes, where they used to barter and trade salmon from as far north as the Yukon, back east, and down south as far as the Columbia River.

We used to nurture and look after 100 million fish per year. That's how many used to come back and spawn. So there was an abundance of salmon in the ocean all the time, until this greed happened. But we're all human beings, so naturally it happens. Now we're struggling with a few million fish and the pinch is happening to the small people. The crunch that is happening to the small fisherman today has been going on with us, the interior people, for 100 years.

No one listens to a man who makes $8,000, or $15,000, or $50,000. The government doesn't acknowledge you. They certainly don't listen to the interior tribes, where the salmon go back to spawn and where they're born.

We are heavily laden with a welfare system that the federal government has implemented. We have 74 reserves north of Sawmill Creek, where supposedly this AFS pilot project for commercial fishery ends. There are 74 other bands in that Fraser River basin. I'll tell you one thing. We are probably running somewhere between 95% and 97% unemployment. They stick you in these little reservations where there's nothing. You can't make a living, so you have to leave.

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I can remember, now that they've introduced the Bill C-31 problem, when if you left the reserve you lost your Indian status.

Now it comes down to a few million fish a year that we fight about. I think all people who are not filthy rich are going to have to get along with the native people. We have not given up our right to this province. We certainly have to sit down and discuss land treaties. My Nlaka'pamux country is not for sale. Basically it's not for sale. I'm not going to kick the white people out. I'm not going to say, “Now you get out of here, because this is mine”. No, I won't do that. I've learned to share.

So we have to get a few things straight here. As I said, land claims have not been settled or haven't even begun, and therefore the resources are there. The resources belong to who owns them.

Mr. Anderson, the Minister of Fisheries and Oceans, has a real problem there in saying who's going to get the salmon. It's a real problem, because I could look back. I feel very frustrated now. I grew up for ten years in an Indian residential school, where at the age of 12 I had my jaw broken by the canon, the guy who ran the school. You know, that sort of reminds me of what Fisheries and Oceans are doing to us on the river. They hover over us in their helicopters. They go in numbers down on us and our people run away and they get caught and they get beaten up. All of these things are happening. The federal government should know about it and do something about it.

Anyway, the small stakeholders, these people with the small boats, can't just say “Those Indians don't need anything”. We've been going without for 100 years. Things are going to have to change.

Thank you for your time.

The Vice-Chairman (Mr. Gary Lunn): Thank you very much, Mr. Dunston.

Is Greg Taylor here?

Mr. John Murray (Coalition of Concerned Fishermen): My name is John Murray. I'm president of the Pacific Gillnetters Association, but I'm here representing what's known as the Coalition of Concerned Fishermen, who were originally qualified supporters of the Mifflin plan.

One of my problems in coming to things like this is that you don't get very much balance. You get polarized opinion. I guess I'm on the side opposite to that of some you've heard already.

The plight of coastal communities, lack of individual viability, failures of processors and many other situations are often given as resulting directly from the Mifflin plan. Your visits to troll-based communities this week will not give you a very balanced view for yourselves or from others. I'm here to tell you that ocean survival, dwindling alternate employment, gratuitous reallocation of salmon to natives and other groups or individuals, provincial interference in management and the consultation processes and poor management by DFO and various provincial ministries all contribute to the problem. It's not just one thing.

The fleet reduction hasn't gone far enough. Although there's less crowding on the grounds and the fisheries are safer and there are fewer boats, for easier management, we're not yet viable. Self-reduction is almost complete, because without viability cannibalization cannot continue. Poor fishermen in the commercial sector are worse conservationists than greedy fishermen in any sector.

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After saying that, I'll tell you that we're not dumb people. We realize conservation is a priority and if we're too hard on the resource we're only cutting off both our feet and both our hands. But economic necessity sometimes drives things a little harder than it should.

HRDC programs and funds to be used to mitigate the hardships caused by Mifflin are entirely administered by the UFAWU and CAW. This is in spite of an industry-inspired study completed by Kwantlen College last year, pointing out the shortcomings of such an approach. This study has been swept under the carpet by HRDC. Charles Perrin, regional manager of employment programs and services for British Columbia and the Yukon, personally denied me access to a meeting held to outline the strategy to administer these funds and called the study “insignificant”.

Having said that, I'm not saying the people you just heard from, UFAWU and CAW, are doing a bad job. They are doing a good job. It's HRDC, as you've already heard, who are not reaching everybody they should be.

Of great concern to the supporters of the plan is a failure of the federal government to keep its commitments as outlined in letters by former fisheries minister Tobin to the Pacific round table participants and a letter by former fisheries Minister Mifflin to licence holders. I've given those with the brief there, so I won't go through all that.

One of these promises was risk-averse management. They practised it in 1996. They forgot about it in 1997. They forgot about enforcement. The only enforcement visible to me was during the Fraser River pilot sales protest fisheries, in which I participated.

The current fisheries minister has said he will consider harvesting Fraser River sockeye in offshore fisheries and inshore areas before run size or composition can be determined, which is directly not risk averse; it's anything but. This shift of focus in management is open to lobbying by self-interest groups. It also affects the choices made by fishermen and encourages cheating.

Licence fees were promised to be fair, equitable, and based on ability to pay. The troll fleet has at least double the gross income of the gillnet fleet but pays the same fee. Is this fair or equitable?

In the north the fees of $60 for individuals for a personal licence and $13.90 for vessels have no relationship with the ability to pay. The average gross income for gillnetters in the north was under $10,000 for 1997. You've heard that. Vessels under 30 feet pay considerably less than longer vessels and have the same access to opportunity as the longer vessel of the same gear type. Is this a fair situation?

Support for the Mifflin plan was based on promises by your government to settle two allocation issues. To this day not one promise has been kept. Sure, processes are in place, but they no longer deal with the key issues for which they were promised. There has been considerable delay even in getting the process going, and there have been changes in the individuals responsible.

Dr. Art May was supposed to deliver a report guaranteeing access to the resource to all sectors and to quantify each sector's share. He ignored the aboriginal sector and quantified nothing. He also failed to develop transparent methods of share transfers. Now Sam Toy is in charge of implementing the May report and was given none of the background to that report. I'm enclosing the three letters previously mentioned with this report as the background so you will realize why we think all politicians are either liars or supporters of liars.

The Kelleher process on allocation among the three gear sectors has failed because of the weakness of DFO management to make decisions. Lobbying has become the order of the day, and rules or fairness be damned. Minister Anderson has now told Kelleher to expand the commercial allocation process beyond the commercial sector and to include any third party expressing any interest. This is not what was promised in the beginning.

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Gear buy-back is part of the plan. The retirement of this gear was to be permanent. Some of it has been given or sold to special interest groups. Some has even been offered for sale by DFO employees working in the Fraser River division after swearing the proposed purchaser to secrecy.

While we are speaking of the Fraser River division of DFO, is it true that there was no signed AFS pilot sales agreement with the upriver Sto:lo in 1997 and yet they were given the same commercial opportunity as their downriver brothers? With the same opportunity, they reported only about one-tenth of the catch per fisherman. I find this very hard to believe, because the guys upriver from them again did even better.

These agreements are so ironclad that DFO say that they can't enforce any selective gear changes, even for conservation reasons. Whereas the rest of us in the commercial fleet have mesh size restrictions and so on for conservation, those same mesh size restrictions cannot be imposed on the pilot sales program, because it is not allowed.

Unless this committee and the rest of government force DFO to fulfil its obligations, you can look forward to chaos, civil disobedience on an increasing scale and the loss of our salmon resource.

Sound policy and decision-making come from the top, not the bottom, and it is about time we had some. Our decisions have been based on announced policies, whether or not we have agreed with these policies, because we have been told repeatedly that the Mifflin plan or the policy is here to stay.

This is the basis of the stability that both fishermen and the resource need.

If the minister intends to allow trollers relaxed rules on area licensing and risk management, then the other gear types will want the same treatment. If this happens, the Mifflin plan is dead, along with the economic life of every fisherman who invested in licences, gear, boats, etc., believing what we were told by politicians and bureaucrats.

In conclusion, I want to leave you with four points.

The minister is changing the rules of the Mifflin plan before our four-year reaction time has elapsed or before the review that was promised.

The calibre process has become all-inclusive and unwieldy at the direction of the minister. This is a major policy change regarding allocation and CFIC. It allows the most effective lobbyists to control allocation. Changing procedures now is totally irresponsible of Anderson and constitutes an end run around CFIC.

The Dr. Art May and Sam Toy process has taken too long and has now lost its original focus. The gratuitous reallocation of salmon to pilot sales agreements from the commercial sector still exists. This is despite Mifflin's promise that this would not happen.

Fourth, west coast decisions must be made and be seen to be made by west coast people in DFO. Despite my criticism, they are the only group with the knowledge and the infrastructure to handle the task. The province should be part of the decision-making process only as a stakeholder.

For the record, I am a gillnet fisherman.

The Vice-Chairman (Mr. Gary Lunn): We seem to be making some headway on this list. It looks as if I have to back up.

John Stevens.

Mr. John Stevens (Salmon for Canada Defence Committee): I have been asked to present this submission by the Salmon for Canada Defence Committee, which was founded in the summer of 1997 by the Canadian fishers involved in the Alaska ferry dispute.

The Salmon for Canada Defence Committee has been active in dealing with the resulting court cases, both the State of Alaska's case against B.C. fishers and vessels and the action initiated by the Province of B.C. against the U.S.A.

The Salmon for Canada Defence Committee feels that these events underscore the need for a new Pacific salmon treaty. Canada needs a treaty that is based on the equity principle and contains effective measures to enforce that principle so that the Pacific salmon resource is divided fairly between Canada and the U.S.A.

The principle of equity means that each country should harvest salmon that are bound for its native streams. Canada should harvest salmon bound for Canadian streams and the U.S.A. should harvest salmon bound for American streams. Where interceptions occur, fisheries must be managed to avoid any imbalance.

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In my lifetime the U.S.A. has amassed a huge imbalance in interception of Canadian salmon. In recent years Canada has been reducing its interception of American salmon and the U.S.A. has increased interception of Canadian salmon.

The most objectionable interception fishery of 1997 occurred at Noyes Island in southeast Alaska. The Noyes Island fishery was perhaps the single most important cause of the Alaska ferry dispute in Prince Rupert last summer. Canada's northern salmon fleet felt it was robbed by Alaska and sold out by DFO and the federal government.

The recently released Strangway-Ruckelshaus report is recommending that article III of the Pacific Salmon Treaty, the equity clause, be implemented by direct government-to-government negotiations and that interim fishing plans be developed by fish managers for up to two years. The Salmon for Canada Defence Committee would urge this standing committee to press the Prime Minister and his cabinet to elevate this matter in terms of national priority and expedite whatever processes are required to resolve the equity issue for the long term and at least guarantee the Canadian salmon fleet fair access to our own salmon stocks in 1998.

The Salmon for Canada Defence Committee also requests that the standing committee consider another recommendation to the federal government. We feel it would be prudent to see a real Team Canada approach to these negotiations, where the Province of B.C. and the people who work in the B.C. fishing industry have real input into the negotiating process. The current ivory tower approach is not acceptable.

The Salmon for Canada Defence Committee would also like to raise the issue of democracy in our dealings with DFO. People in the fishing industry and the communities we live in feel like pawns in an elaborate chess game. DFO must be accountable to all Canadian taxpayers, but in particular to those pawns I've described above.

There is a growing sense in the B.C. salmon fleet that DFO's agenda is being driven by the corporate sector, led by Allied Processors. In Canada today corporations pay less than 10% of the federal tax revenue. It is time for DFO to represent the people who pay the bills in Canada. The corporate lock on DFO policy must be broken so fishing industry workers and coastal communities are given a chance to plan a common healthy future.

In conclusion, I would like to make some personal remarks. I'm a fourth-generation commercial fisher and I've worked 32 years in the fishing industry. I have been active in the UFAWU-CAW most of my adult life and have served on DFO's Fraser River advisory committee since 1980. It has been difficult to remain involved in the advisory process because of the ivory tower mentality that I and other advisers constantly run into. Real consultation with people such as myself would be most welcome.

Finally, I would like to thank the Standing Committee on Fisheries and Oceans for coming here and listening. I invite questions from any of the committee members.

Before I leave, I would like to mention one more item. Recently there have been discussions between the Province of B.C. and the federal government about having a review of the Mifflin plan and its impact on the coastal communities here and the people in the fishing industry. I can't state strongly enough that the minister should be urged to go ahead with that as soon as possible, but it must be independently facilitated. The last time we got into it was DFO's round table process. We felt we were being manoeuvred by the bureaucrats. We need independence in that.

Also, if a review is to happen, it has to include all areas of DFO salmon policy. The whole ball of wax needs to be examined.

Area licensing and stacking are going to kill us. I don't believe small operators like myself can survive in this climate in the industry. I happen to be probably in the top 10% or 20% of producers in the gillnet fishery—I'm a gillnetter—and I'm just about financially ruined. One more season like that and I can't make it any more. I have only a single licence. I can't afford to get another one. I can't see how a person can possibly make it by overcapitalizing further.

The whole licence plan needs to be reviewed, and the government has to be committed to listening to us, so we have some real input. As I said earlier, I think we can have a healthy resource if we have some input into it.

Thank you very much.

The Vice-Chairman (Mr. Gary Lunn): Dr. Patrick Moore, from the Forest Alliance of British Columbia.

Dr. Patrick Moore (Director, Forest Alliance of British Columbia): Thanks. I wasn't ready for so soon. You must be way ahead of schedule.

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Thank you very much for the opportunity to speak to you, members of the committee.

My name is Patrick Moore. I'm with the Forest Alliance of British Columbia, which is a forest industry sponsored group that is bringing people from around the province from all walks of life together to try to help the forest industry improve its environmental performance and improve British Columbians' understanding of the role of the forest industry in both our economy and our environment.

One of the tasks we've taken on lately in order to demonstrate our desire to work at the community-based consensus and collaborative process is the Squamish estuary program, the Squamish watershed program, where the Forest Alliance funded the establishment of a three-day conference in December last year in which we brought people from all the sectors together. This follows up on a study that was done previously, supported by forest industry companies trying to understand the role of the forest industry in the issue of the Georgia Strait fishery and the decline of fish stocks in those waters.

In other words, we have the situation all the time where one sector blames the other and the other sector blames another, and who's really at fault? In this study we tried to say there are a lot of reasons why fish stocks are declining in the Georgia Strait and other places. Let's see if we can't understand what they are and what the relationships among them are and try to bring all the different players together.

This has led us to believe that the only really viable way to approach this issue is on a watershed basis and by bringing all the different actors and players in that watershed together to try to help in a community-based context.

That isn't really the reason why I've come before you today. It's actually got to do more with the larger issue, not just of the interaction between fisheries and forestry, but indeed with Bill C-65 that had tried to go through the Parliament of Canada before the last election and died before the election but is now being revived. That is a bill called the endangered species legislation for Canada.

It has a lot to do with fish, not only because of the federal jurisdiction but also because of the extensive area in which fish migrate into the inland waters of our country. It has a lot to do with forestry because of the impact of forestry and the potential for it to help with enhancement, in addition to impacting negatively on the fishery in some cases. And it has everything to do with people living in the rural areas of our country, where most of the people in the fishing and forestry industry do indeed live.

During the last couple of years the Forest Alliance has been involved in the creation of a coalition of over 30 associations in western Canada in fisheries, forestry, farming, mining, tourism, and other resource-based industries that are taking place in the rural parts of the country.

I'd like to commend this committee for the extensive consultations it is undertaking, at least in this province. I haven't seen your list for other parts of Canada, but certainly in British Columbia you are making an effort to go out into the areas, even in Vancouver, coming to Steveston, rather than to Robson Centre in the middle of the city. You're going to the other communities around the province, as well. I commend that.

I wish there was a similar counterpart on the part of the environment committee, which is, unfortunately, the one that is responsible for this endangered species legislation. It would seem to me, in fact, that it should be the natural resources committee, your committee on fisheries and forests, and the environment committee. All three should be overseeing this legislation that is coming in, because it so much affects not just the environmental side but also all the resource industry sector.

The Forest Alliance and all the other members of this group support endangered species legislation and want to help protect endangered species in Canada, but the way in which this legislation is coming forward is not acceptable to us and should not be acceptable to anyone involved in fish, particularly the Fisheries and Oceans side of it with anadromous fish stocks such as salmon. It's being done not in a collaborative way, not in a consultative way, but in a confrontational, push-it-down-your-throat way.

When the environment committee did its only consultation in British Columbia on the endangered species legislation, it went to the Robson Square Centre in downtown Vancouver. There was not one visit to any community such as Campbell River or Prince Rupert or Prince George, where this legislation is going to have a potentially major impact.

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In addition to that, we just think it is crazy to follow the U.S. example of bringing in endangered species legislation that makes it such that all the people working in the countryside don't want to be within 1,000 miles of an endangered species. Indeed, in the United States there are many examples of people making sure these endangered species were either eliminated or the habitat that would support them, being on their property or in their vicinity, would be eliminated, to make sure they did not have an “endangered species problem”.

We want endangered species legislation that makes the forest industry, the mining industry, the farming industry, and the fishing industry want to save endangered species and to help make habitats for those species to live in in a healthy fashion. The only way we can do that is to work with people in the communities on an actual watershed basis. These endangered species do not live in the urban centres, where all the votes are for endangered species legislation.

We all want endangered species legislation, but it doesn't do any good to depend on the naivety of people who live where there is not one endangered species, never mind hardly any other species, because they wipe them out with all the cement and the agriculture they have laid down in building their urban and agricultural environment. Meanwhile, the people who live out in the woods, on the rivers, and in the rural areas are the ones who are going to have to deal with this issue politically and economically. And it will come back on the people in the city, because they are the ones who depend on all the resources that are coming from the hinterland, where this type of legislation is going to impact. People don't realize how severe an impact this kind of legislation could have.

To conclude, I would encourage you, please, to encourage your colleagues, Mr. Caccia and the other members of the environment committee, to do as thorough a job as you are doing in consulting the general public on this key issue of endangered species, which impacts so much on fish and forestry. Would you also please inform your colleagues in Parliament of the importance of this issue as the government attempts once again to put it through for passage.

Thank you very much.

The Vice-Chairman (Mr. Gary Lunn): I would now like to call on Mary Sue Atkinson.

Ms. Mary Sue Atkinson (Speak for the Salmon): Honourable members, I'm a mother of three and a grassroots community volunteer dedicated to preserving our salmon heritage for future generations.

Our salmon stocks are a public resource. For this reason, information about them should be readily available to the owners of the resource, the public.

Both the province and DFO are committed to establishing the Pacific Fisheries Conservation Council. How this will work is that this council will report to the provincial minister, the federal minister, and the public on the state of the stocks and the habitats. This council will be an ombudsman to speak for the fish, and only for the fish.

It has been 36 months since the Hon. John Fraser actually recommended this in his Fraser sockeye review committee report. The real question we have is how we can ensure this council will represent the public interest. This council must remain at arm's length away from both political and stakeholder interests.

The public cares a great deal about our salmon. Salmon are part of our life on the west coast. Our salmon are us.

A 1996 report done for the American Fisheries Society found that 142 stocks of our salmon and trout have gone extinct in B.C. in this century. Another 624 stocks are at high risk of extinction. Our coho are among these threatened stocks. This substantial loss of diversity lessens the ability of the surviving stocks to withstand negative impacts from natural events such as El Niño.

I have a graph in my report about the coho. It shows the southern B.C. coho catch from 1980 to 1997. As you can see, it seems to be extremely high, even when DFO biologists actually found in the 1970s the coho stocks were declining. It remained very high until just recently.

The Pacific Stock Assessment Review Committee report on southern coho was finally released by DFO to the public on August 22, 1997. This was five months after this report had been completed.

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Remember, the salmon are a public resource.

This document is the basis of the DFO's coho management plan for 1997. It stated, on escapements—I guess you know what escapements are by now:

The numbers of fish returning to spawn to their natal streams to indicator stocks has been trending down for at least the last 12 years and were extremely low in 1996, especially on Vancouver Island and in the Thompson system. Marine survivals began to drop in the late 1980s and continued to decline in 1996 on Vancouver Island.

It concludes:

Coho populations in many Strait of Georgia drainages are at very low levels. It is essential, in the short term, that fishery exploitation rates are reduced much below recent levels to increase the proportion of all stock that is allowed to spawn. Coho habitat must also be protected and restored.

Very low spawning escapements in 1996 to many Strait of Georgia and Thompson River streams raises a very serious conservation concern for adult returns in 1999. It is especially important to conserve the 1997 return to minimize the likelihood of consecutive poor brood years.

This report recommends, given the poor marine survival trend observed since the late 1980s and the extremely low escapement levels observed in 1996, harvest managers should be prepared to implement stringent conservation measures in the 1999 fishing season.

What bothers me the most is that DFO was well aware of this coho decline for the last 12 years and it took them so long to take any action to reduce the catch. That really bothers me.

In 1996, 220,000 coho were allowed to be killed, 170,000 by recreational fisheries and 50,000 as commercial bycatch. These are 220,000 coho that have precious wild coho mixed in with the hatchery stocks as well.

On January 9, 1998—this was about two weeks ago—Fisheries Minister David Anderson announced:

As a result of poor marine survival and changing ocean conditions, the downward trend in coho production in B.C. continues, despite management measures taken by DFO. It is clear there are serious conservation concerns for coho stocks coastwide. If we are to sustain wild coho populations for future generations, it is clear we must continue to put conservation of our valuable coho stocks first.

The northern coho as well this year had their lowest return on record since records began to be kept in 1956.

So I really believe that we should learn from our mistakes in the east coast fishery and react quickly to these alarm bells.

At this point we need to use heroic measures to salvage the remaining wild coho stocks. Our coho are like a patient that has been gradually getting sicker and we've waited far too long to take them to the hospital. They're now in the emergency ward. Diagnosis: chronic coho abuse. Status: critical, not responding to current treatment.

The action that needs to be taken seems to be straightforward. We have to increase freshwater survival. To do that, we need dramatic improvement in freshwater habitat in order to make sure that as many coho smolts as possible make it to the ocean.

Our approach so far has been extremely reactive and not proactive. We wait for the damage to occur and then we try to fix it later.

We have to protect what existing habitat we have. We need laws to protect riparian areas from development, especially in urban areas. This is where coho spawn; 80% of our coho actually spawn below Hope in the lower Fraser area here. The District of North Vancouver is the only municipality that has actually adopted land development guidelines for the protection of aquatic habitat right into their bylaws. If we want to bring back our coho stocks, these laws need to apply province-wide.

Riparian areas provide food, shelter, and cover for the fish. They're really important. Habitat has to be protected for the entire life cycle of the salmon as well.

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First we have to identify environmentally sensitive areas, then protect them. We should create refuges from predators where coho can hide. We need to increase riparian planting and ensure adequate water quality and quantity. This is going to be a stream-by-stream approach.

It seems to me we must decrease the fishing pressure on wild stocks. If catch-and-release is seen by DFO as an answer in this coming fishing season and sport fishers are allowed to catch and release wild coho, a 10% mortality is associated with the act of actually releasing the fish. If the same fish is caught several times, that risk increases.

I think we need a moratorium on all recreational fishing for coho for two years. In my view, we need mandatory onboard, independent observers on commercial boats as well, to get a really clear, accurate understanding of the coho by-catch. We have to be really sure of the data at this point, because our coho are a public resource.

The Pacific Fisheries Conservation Council I think could be extremely important to our salmon right now. We need this watchdog very soon. It's supposed to be set up by April of this year. We hope it can provide some really good updates to the public.

As a volunteer, I feel we can rebuild our highly valuable coho stocks. Now is the time for action. We are all responsible for allowing the coho to reach this state. We should all play a part in bringing them back to health. We are at the eleventh hour. Let us not let them slip through our fingers.

Thank you very much for your time. I appreciate the chance to speak to you.

The Vice-Chairman (Mr. Gary Lunn): Our next person is Jim Fulton, from the David Suzuki Foundation.

I heard a rumour that you are a politician, so we are going to time you.

Mr. Jim Fulton (David Suzuki Foundation): Mr. Chairman, ladies and gentlemen, welcome. I'm not going to take a lot of your time, because I'm basically going to read the riot act. But I won't read it too quickly.

I think minutes are being kept. Is that right, Mr. Chairman?

The Vice-Chairman (Mr. Gary Lunn): Yes.

Mr. Jim Fulton: Good.

I have a few documents for you, but let me run quickly through a few of the things I've been doing. Since I spent 15 years on this committee I have some knowledge of some of the things the committee can do, and I'm going to urge you to do a number of things, because I think our industry really is in trouble, and on all three coasts.

The David Suzuki Foundation has been involved in doing a number of studies in the last couple of years, and we've actually been quite amazed at how immune the Department of Fisheries and Oceans is to reality. They seem to be completely incapable of understanding the public interest, but they do understand the interests of big, powerful actors very well, whether it's in Newfoundland or anywhere else in Atlantic Canada or here in British Columbia. Wherever they operate, whether it's in big projects, on the terrestrial systems, in the freshwater systems, or in the salt water, big money talks and small communities and fishermen and fish stocks walk, usually to extinction.

I'm actually alarmed now, and I think Parliament actually has to step in and read the riot act to the senior mandarins. I think that means bringing the deputy minister and all the senior ADMs before this committee when you get back to Ottawa and really reading them the riot act. They are living in a dream world.

Let me just give you some examples. I think you know as well as anybody, Mr. Chairman, when the 50,000 Newfoundland fishers, both men and women, were told to hit the road, everybody wondered, well, somebody's head is going to roll. Was the head of the Minister of Fisheries going to roll, or of the deputy, or of somebody else? Here we are, half a dozen years later, and no heads have rolled. Here we are, half a dozen years later, and no heads have rolled.

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There can't be another industry on the face of the earth where you can destroy that number of communities. This was an environmental collapse of worldwide ramifications to put that many people out of work and to kill off the Atlantic cod as efficiently as the mangers allowed it to be killed off.

One of the recommendations I'm going to make tonight is that you take a resolution from this committee to the floor of the House for an amendment to the Criminal Code in relation to public servants who knowingly allow stocks to be decimated to the point of collapse, either through management and licensing or through the approval of projects we see here in B.C., with approval of projects like Alcan and Kemano. We see it relentlessly with mixed stock interception fisheries.

Many people in this province are unaware even what is the largest fishery in this province. It is the trawl fishery. You probably haven't even had a single witness on it. It's the largest fishery. Sixty percent of those stocks that are landed on a daily and a weekly basis are either landed directly in U.S. ports, or they're trucked to U.S. ports, or they're landed on factory ships offshore. They're joined by Japanese, Polish, Russian, Korean, and other factory ships in strip mining the offshore stocks off the west coast of this country. It's being done relentlessly, and in some cases stocks are being taken as by-catch that's dumped back dead at larger tonnages than is allowed to be taken sustainably. I'm talking about crab. I'm talking about turbot. More turbot is dumped as by-catch by the trawlers in this province than is allowed under NAFO to all of the European nations.

When Minister Tobin was going after the Estai and went to the United Nations about it, that was in relation to turbot, to smaller tonnages than the entire European fleet dump as by-catch between the Queen Charlotte Islands and Prince Rupert. These things need to be investigated. The amount of black cod, salmon, and chinook by-catch being dumped—there are huge volumes being dumped. In terms of all the stocks being pillaged on the west coast, it is one of the big secrets of British Columbia.

We recommend that the existing trawl fishery, both on the shelf and in deep water, be shut down in its existing form. I urge the committee to look into it.

We also looked at six other fisheries where we recommended.... Mixed stock interception fisheries pose the greatest biological risk to extension in this province. We made that recommendation with a peer review document written by Carl Walters, the head of fisheries at the University of British Columbia. We involved stakeholders; we involved former people from DFO; we involved people from the union, from first nations, from academia, from the public. We made these recommendations in good faith. Three years later not a single one of the recommendations has been acted on and not a single one of the recommendations has been denied by DFO managers. They know we've got extinction fisheries going on and they're doing nothing about it.

I leave that document with you, with the recommendations in it.

We followed up on that. It's called “Fish on the Line”. That has actually been more popular. If this was being sold out of a bookstore by a publisher, it would be on Canada's best-seller list. We're on our fifth publication of this.

British Columbians want solutions and they're certainly not getting them from DFO.

We then published, thanks to the great writing of Terry Glavin, a well-known B.C. writer, the analysis of the trawl fishery, what's happening in terms of the B.C. offshore. It is filled with recommendations, with activities that in almost any other field would be described as criminal activity, and yet not a single thing has been done by DFO. I urge you to get researchers for the committee to go through that and have a look at it.

We then looked at fisheries all over the world and said okay, in Canada we've got to change the model. The model at the moment is a corporate model. Almost the majority of the money spent here in B.C. each year by DFO is not on what the public thinks it is; it's for DFO scientists to study projects that are brought forward by Alcan or big mining companies or municipalities. The department pays to study the projects and tell the promoters of the projects what they should really be doing. So we the taxpayers get stuck paying for that, and then there's no money left in DFO to have creek guardians, or to do counts, or taggings, or any of the kinds of things you need in order to have a sustainable fishery.

I think the committee should look at that and make some recommendations for user pay. The big corporations are always saying to the fishermen and to the communities and everybody else, oh well, you've got to pay your own way. Well, I say to Alcan and these guys, it's time you guys paid. Let DFO have two cents left so they can actually go and do what we recommend in here, which again I recommend the committee take a good look at.

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We looked at fisheries everywhere in the world. In 15 of the 17 regions of the world stocks are either in collapse or heading for extinction. That's in almost every area of the world. We looked at 10 particular case studies of fisheries, both salt and fresh water, in North America, in Japan, and Australia. These are sustainable fisheries that have gone on for centuries and the stocks have remained stable. In every single case it's community licences and community management. And that's what we're calling for here in B.C.

Why should Pat Chamut and Louis Tousignant and these other guys in their ivory tower on Parliament Hill be making decisions for our communities here? All of our fishing communities in B.C. are dying because of mismanagement.

It seems to me that if we can look around the world and find 10 sustainable fisheries—even at Lake Titicaca in South America: 400 years fishing, 17 different stocks, the largest freshwater fishery in the Americas, every single stock stable for 400 years, and not a single DFO employee.

And that brings me to one of our most recent reports, called Net Loss: The Salmon Net Cage Industry. I don't need to tell you in particular, Mr. Chairman, or some of the other members from Atlantic Canada, what's going on as we slaughter quietly, without cameras, without the CBC, without newspapers reporting, hundreds of thousands of sick, diseased, dying salmon in the pens in Atlantic Canada, dying of marine anemia.

People in British Columbia think, oh well, salmon net cage, that's not happening here. Well, we just had a salmon aquaculture review because we had triple antibiotic resistant furunculosis in the pens here. That means the bugs are not just resistant to one antibiotic, not just two antibiotics, but three.

You members of the committee ought to be able to tell me how many wild salmon swimming in B.C. or off Atlantic Canada pull into a health clinic and have a little shot in the butt, have an antibiotic so they don't pick up what's going on in the salmon open net cages. And we wonder.

The wild Atlantic salmon industry is about to be shut. We're down to 200,000 wild stock.

Look at Norway. Look at Scotland. Look everywhere where there has been open net cage farming of carnivores. What carnivores are raised in cages in North America? Alligators, mink, and salmon. We don't raise wolves in Abbotsford to eat.

At some point we have to shake our heads and wake up. Why is it that the salmon farmers have decided that they want to have their open net cages all along the migratory routes for our wild salmon? Do you know what poses the greatest single threat on the face of the earth to the profitability of open net cage salmon farming? Wild salmon. They want an end to wild salmon.

I urge you to take a look at the recommendations we have in here and scratch your heads. Why on July 27 did the House of Commons pass the regulation for the movement of Atlantic salmon eggs in this country without any proper form of public consultation or hearings?

In this document you'll find federal and provincial senior public servants warning that the movement of Atlantic salmon and smolts the way we're doing it is Russian roulette and that it's an absolute certainty that there will be a movement of disease from inside those net cages out into the wild stocks. That cost Norway $100 million just to start sanitizing entire river systems from an outbreak of disease in many ways thanks to this industry.

There's an opportunity right now. Regrettably, it seems Minister Anderson has been taken political hostage by the salmon open net cage operators. There is an opportunity to bring in closed, looped space containment systems that keep the disease, if it breaks out, inside so that the salmon farmers have to deal with the problem that right now they're sharing with all of the public.

The public are subsidizing the open net cage industry by allowing them here in B.C. to dump the same amount of sewage as a city of 500,000 every day, particularly into the waters around Vancouver Island. We're not being notified of disease outbreaks.

They are using the most powerful antibiotic drugs left on the face of earth, ivermectin. Read about the drugs, read about the disease, and ask yourself why the senior mandarins who are quoted in this report, who are worried about it and opposed to it, are allowing this industry to continue unabated without making them pay their own way. I find it just an appalling and an abominable state.

• 2220

I have six quick recommendations. Recommendations are always useful to a committee.

Number one, I urge you to have the dirty dozen, the 12 ADMs and deputy minister of DFO, before your committee and read them the riot act. When you read them the riot act, read them the amendments to the Criminal Code that you're going to take to the floor of the House of Commons, which provides mandatory jail time for public servants that knowingly allow fisheries or projects that impact on fisheries that lead to the collapse or extinction of fish stocks.

If we can't get an amendment like that passed in the House of Commons, we're wasting our time. There's no use asking any longer for whistle-blowing legislation. We know the largest single industrial collapse in the history of Canada just occurred in Atlantic Canada: 50,000 men and women put out of work; here in B.C., close to 10,000. And all of the public servants that were responsible got a promotion. We've got to ask ourselves, are we on planet Mars?

I urge you, I really think you've got to take that kind of medicine, because then public servants will say to ministers and they'll say to the public, we won't open that fishery; we won't allow that project, because if we do knowingly, we know we'll go to jail. It's a fail-safe system: it protects the public servants and it protects the resource.

I think you have to tell the senior mandarins to stop those fisheries that are leading to widespread stock extinctions. Surely the standing committee has a right to tell managers to stop fisheries that are leading to extinctions.

We signed the Convention on Biodiversity in 1992 in Rio de Janeiro. That has now been signed by the number of countries necessary for it to be ratified and implemented world-wide. We were one of the leading signatories. This is one of the few times I publicly say thank you to Brian Mulroney. Thank you, Brian Mulroney. That's all you get.

I think we have to recognize that the depletion of genetic material is important. You need look no further than this coast to see we've had major extinctions on this coast: 164 of our salmon runs are now extinct; another 600 are on the brink of extinction. Almost one-third of all the races of salmon in British Columbia are extinct or about to go extinct. Entire fisheries: the pilchard fishery is extinct; abalone, run by the mysterious magicians of bureaucracy, had to be closed because it was overfished. There are all kinds of fisheries that are now being overfished, particularly the trawl.

I urge you to take the earliest opportunity when the House reopens for all of you to question the Minister of Fisheries on why he's allowing open salmon net cages to continue in Canadian waters with the disease outbreaks there have already been. It's absolutely preposterous not to bring in a timetable to phase them out and go to closed loop technology. It's extraordinary. You don't allow municipalities to dump their sewage into people's drinking water and into people's clam beds, but it's allowed by this industry that uses large numbers of drugs and has serious genetic and disease problems.

I urge you to recommend the establishment of community-based licences for at least 50% of Canada's catch of each species by July 1 of the year 2000. Community licences are demonstrated, you'll see in the report. This is a peer-reviewed document by some of the best scientists in the country. They've made it very clear that community licences where people who have fishing families, live in the community and are going to stay in the community, are not going to recommend crazy openings that are going to bring about extinctions. It really is that simple. It has to be a multi-generational approach, and community licences are the way to go.

I urge you to recommend the establishment of major sanctuaries for each of Canada's fish stocks. Both the jurisdictions above and below us here in B.C., Alaska, and Washington, have now set aside major areas where no trawl is allowed. Their salmon fishery has also collapsed. President Clinton, two years ago, had to declare a closure south of the 49th parallel to the commercial industry. It's very important and it's something we have enough stock information on to set aside sanctuaries for the purposes of science to study what happens when you don't kick the hell out of certain sole populations. I think that's something the House of Commons is uniquely positioned to do.

Other than that, I'm always glad to answer questions or to make myself available.

• 2225

One final thing. To show you what happens when you say something about public servants, if this had happened to me while I was still a member of the House of Commons, this particular public servant would be in orbit with John Glenn, but without the advantage of taking a ride in the Challenger.

We ran an ad about salmon farming. We're a charity. We ran an ad about what was happening in British Columbia. What do we see in the newspaper a few days later but an ad—and get this. The ad was written by a senior public servant by the name of Dr. John Davis on government letterhead, on government time, with government resources, and then it was placed in the newspaper and paid for by the B.C. Salmon Farmers Association.

I sent this material to the committee in September and to the Auditor General. Interestingly enough, the Auditor General immediately responded. The Auditor General was interested in what this public servant was doing on public time, with a public office, science adviser for the Department of Fisheries and Oceans in B.C., attacking a charity because the charity was trying to warn people in British Columbia that there are dangers from salmon farming.

We ran an ad and had to face a blister attack by public servants we are paying for.

I would urge the committee to take a close look at this. We quoted two of the best known infectious disease medical authorities in Canada—Dr. Bill Bowie at the Vancouver General Hospital in particular—as the basis for our ad.

We have someone who has lower scientific credentials attacking material that we have. Dr. Davis was factually wrong in five areas: on the risks of salmon farming; on the risks of using Atlantic salmon; on the risks of disease from farmed salmon to wild salmon; on the levels of antibiotics released from net cages; and he even challenged the accuracy of statements by Dr. Julien Davies, the head of microbiology at the University of British Columbia, and Dr. Bill Bowie, the past president of infectious diseases for humans in Canada.

Not a thing has happened. The minister refused to answer my letter, which I wrote to him following this ad. The deputy minister did not answer. The Auditor General said the deputy minister is responsible.

I've sent it to your committee, and I know you are busy, but I would hope that when you read the riot act to the senior people in the Department of Fisheries and Oceans you bring Dr. Davis along and just ask him who the hell he thinks he is using his position as a paid public servant to be attacking charities who are trying to protect a public resource. If he has some reasonable, rational response as to why he should be using public time and the public dime to be standing up for the B.C. Salmon Farming Association, who have pretty deep pockets to play in, with people like Galen Weston, a billionaire, and companies like Dow, one of the largest chemical companies in the world....

This is the Canadian salmon net cage industry. Why we have these mandarins out there pandering only to the big vessel owners, to the big exporters of our resources, and to the big corporations while the little fisherman and the little stocks and the little communities die makes me sick. Welcome to British Columbia.

The Vice-Chairman (Mr. Gary Lunn): Thank you, Mr. Fulton. I want you to know that you have some allies up here. I have asked to have all the top brass at DFO fired and we should weld the doors shut in Ottawa. We don't need 800 of them down there. We should bring them to Vancouver and St. John's.

You have some allies. We are going to press hard on this. We've gone as far as to say that the level of corruption in DFO is beyond imagination. You have lots of believers. That's why we are out here listening to you people.

We're down to a few more speakers. I'm going to forge ahead. I think we have Mr. McKee. If we can try to keep this as short as possible, that would be just wonderful. We're still listening.

Mr. Charles H. McKee (Wild Fish First Society): I have previously delivered a little manual that you might just want to have a quick look at. It's up on the table.

The last act is an extremely difficult act to follow. I've heard Mr. Fulton speak before, and thank God I haven't had to follow him before.

• 2230

It is my opinion that the federal Department of Fisheries and Oceans is a corrupt organization, and I've chosen the word “corrupt” carefully. Words are my business.

I'm a licensed commercial troll fisherman. I'm a processor and a commercial lawyer. I've been a sports fisherman for 50 years and a commercial fisherman for 30 years.

I repeat that the federal Department of Fisheries and Oceans is a corrupt organization. The so-called Pacific salmon revitalization strategy, or the Mifflin plan, is so economically stupid, environmentally dangerous, and socially devastating that it could not possibly have simply been the result of bungling by civil servants. The plan's implementation to date is proof beyond any doubt that there is more than bureaucratic stupidity involved. Something is wrong when government is trying to eliminate a safer use, which is troll and which is worth three to ten times the value of a dangerous use, which produces no tax revenue.

There's an unholy alliance. There's an alliance between the federal Department of Fisheries and Oceans and two large, well-connected party supporters who are processors in the province.

I'd like to deal a little bit with economics. Ten super seine boats can catch the entire allowable catch for salmon in British Columbia. It takes ten. The true profit potential of this industry is about $4 billion per year within eight years of implementation of the DFO unholy alliance strategy; $4 billion within eight years. This industry is not a sunset industry.

I know a lot about big business. The perspective of big business is approximately three months minus one day. Remuneration for senior executives in large public companies is based on stock price and what you make in the next quarter, and that's it. There is no strategic planning, so how could anybody plan eight years out to make $4 billion a year? It just so happens that these two processors are family companies, family companies that are looking to make billions of dollars for their grandchildren.

Do any of you happen to have the book I previously delivered to you? I'd like to deal briefly with the pictures, which are exhibits 4 and 5. I'd like to start with what I would call the stolen fish scandal. Last summer the Alaskans stole a minimum of 1.5 million sockeye salmon from British Columbian fishermen with the encouragement of the minister. I won't refer to him as the hon. minister. I will never refer to him as the hon. minister. The minister encouraged Alaskans to steal 1.5 million, minimum, salmon from our fishermen.

You might ask why. Flip over to schedule 5, which has some pictures of labels on it. There is one that says “Clover Leaf”. There's another “Clover Leaf”. On the next page we have “Ocean”. Then we have a few “Gold Seals”, and then we have another “Clover Leaf” on the next page. A quick look at those labels shows the “Gold Seal” labels and the “Clover Leaf” labels all look relatively the same. They're not. If you look very closely at the two labels at the bottom of the first page of schedule 5, those are labels from Mr. Galen Weston's wonderful canning company called B.C. Packers. They are an internationally known, quality label for British Columbia salmon.

• 2235

Take a look at the bottom label and you'll see that it says “product of the U.S.A.” Where did that can come from? That can came from a joint venture cannery operated by Galen Weston and Jimmy Pattison in Alaska. Do you know what was in that can? That can contained sockeye salmon stolen from the fishermen of the province of British Columbia. Our great corporate citizens stole salmon from British Columbia fishermen and then they had the nerve—if you look at the next page you'll see a few sales slips—to sell it back to me. If you look at the very first sales slip you'll see that Clover Leaf, because of brand recognition, sells for 30¢ a can more than Gold Seal. They both come off exactly the same assembly line in the state of Alaska.

Let's talk about the treaty scandal. The minister has been trying to encourage the Americans not to negotiate. Why? Why does he say things like “we must consider the whole country, not just B.C.”? If the Alaskans continue to overfish, we will have to reduce our catch by 40%. Canada is prepared to weaken its hard line. What alternative is there? Mike Hunter, Anderson's boss, was quoted as saying the industry is too important to hold out for every last dollar. Well, Canada hasn't held out for anything.

Canada hasn't negotiated in those treaties, and the only reason anybody knows anything about those treaties right now is because stakeholders are involved. In the past, the federal government went into negotiations, and they thought, god, we have to consider the whole country. Well, they considered the part of the country that they consider to be the whole country. They considered wool suits, auto parts, and pork bellies. Those are much more important than salmon, so we'll give the Alaskans another $70 million worth of salmon and we'll settle on...gee, there won't be any more tariffs on those wool suits going down to the States.

I'd like to deal briefly with one more topic, which is what I call the marketing scam. DFO and the provincial government have been persuaded to maintain outdated, useless health quality inspection regulations and other red tape to make sure that independent operators can't compete.

I'd like you to look at the pretty pictures in schedule 4. On the first page we see in Galen Weston's store fresh, superfresh salmon, and if you look at it closely in the first picture you will see some nice filets. In the second and third pictures we see some pretty nicely displayed salmon. Those fresh, superfresh fish are farm salmon, laden with chemicals and antibiotics. Ten feet away, on the next page, let's have a look at how Galen Weston markets B.C. wild salmon. In the first picture, if you look over on the right hand side, you'll see a salmon that's wrapped up in a plastic bag, frozen, and covered in freezer burns. I pulled that salmon out and I saw that it was a wild pink. I took it home and started to thaw it out. I had to put it outside because of the stink.

If you look at photo number five, you'll see on the side a whole bunch of red marks on it, and if you look at photo number six and open it up, that's what was inside this wonderful wild salmon: blood and guts.

I have asked the Salmon Marketing Council in British Columbia, which is controlled by B.C. Packers, why we don't have a little negative marketing about foreign salmon. They say oh no, we can't possibly say bad things about salmon because people won't know and they might not buy our wild salmon. Well, I say to hell with that. This is what I call negative marketing. B.C. Packers control the fish farms. They're selling these wonderful, beautiful-looking farm salmon, and then 10 feet away there's a whole lot of negative marketing going on.

• 2240

I told a lie. I'm going to talk about one more thing. I'm going to talk about the large companies' price and tax scam.

At the present time there is a multimillion dollar lawsuit going on in the state of Alaska. I have had numerous conversations with the lawyers who are conducting it and I've read the materials. There's $600 million to $900 million in damages being claimed. Two small processors have already settled. The plaintiffs have a $2.5-million U.S. war chest, and they're going to trial very shortly.

This lawsuit is about.... The processors and the Japanese trading companies, which control many of them, have deliberately destroyed the market for fresh and frozen wild salmon in North America. I'll repeat that. The processors have deliberately destroyed the market in North America. That's nuts. In a straight, pure economy, nobody could possibly believe that statement. But we don't have a straight economy. We have taxes, and they have taxes in the U.S. Revenue Canada and the IRS try to collect them.

This is the way the system works. Fishermen are paid $2 a pound. There is no marketing in North America—believe me, there is no marketing in North America. The wholesale price is established at $2.50 a pound. The salmon is then sold by bill of lading to a company in either the Grand Caymans, the Netherlands Antilles, or in any other country where there are no taxes. That offshore, tax-haven country then sells them on the Tokyo fish market. Everybody knows that's a huge international market where the prices are bid on, and so on and so forth. It's fine and dandy.

Well, that market isn't a free market. That market is controlled, and the price is fixed in that market. The tax investigators see that there's no profit being made, but what they don't do is see what the Japanese housewife pays. She pays $20 a pound. It costs $2 a pound in the grounds, it costs $1 a pound to ship and handle it, and there's $17 in profit made in this deal. Is there one nickel of tax paid in Canada or the U.S.? Not a nickel.

Not only is there no tax paid, but B.C. Packers use their capital cost allowance to shelter the income they make on tuna, which they import from out of the country. So not only do they pay no tax, but they use their vessels and their equipment capital cost allowance to shelter the rest of their income.

The Department of Fisheries and Oceans knows what is going on here. This is political. They're being ordered. They are corrupt.

Thank you very much.

The Vice-Chairman (Mr. Gary Lunn): Could we have Terry Slack? If you could try to keep to five minutes, it would be very much appreciated.

Mr. Philip Tate (Individual Presentation): I'm from Moricetown. My name is on the board. The letter came back, received.

The Vice-Chairman (Mr. Gary Lunn): What is your name?

Mr. Philip Tate: Philip Tate. I have a letter from these people.

The Vice-Chairman (Mr. Gary Lunn): Okay.

• 2245

Mr. Philip Tate: It's very important to our ground, including the U.S. and Canada, to our B.C. waters, including river sides, oceans, the Arctic Ocean, right up to Alaska and throughout B.C.'s inside water and through our commercial fishing zone....

I have a complete plan to try to say what it says here. Northern pike is close to all of us. This is the worst one; it is very bad and is not going to stop: air sickness. This is the best one: Arctic Circle, Canada, and the U.S.

The Pacific Ocean is our ground. It is close to you and me, each one of us. 1990, the year of loss. We lost: myself, both sides. It will never come back.

We have to try first to look forward. We have to organize and help each other. We have to try to do our best to save our B.C. water.

The loss of water...came out so bad that a pulp mill in Prince Rupert has been extended. Gas, and all that water.... Ever since, everything has disappeared: the salmon, oolichan, herring, coho. Pink salmon are the worst, and herring. There is strong pressure. It doesn't take much to lose. Under the water, they fight.

We are missing.... They are gone.

In 1996, there was a kind of red tide, poison, that was very dangerous. It was spotted in Principe Channel on the Alaska border, at Dundas, and right through to Beaver Pass.

That is why we always have problems between the U.S. and Canada. The U.S., I believe, fishes millions of fish, which gives Canada a problem.

To make it worse, in the year 1999-2000 the whole of B.C. is going to lose completely. We will have no open commercial or Indian fishing on the riverside.

In 1996 red tide was spotted around the Arctic Circle, in the Bering Sea. That was the worst.

We are all going to share. The fishermen here have hard times on the way. Myself, I barely get around. At least I have my home on the reserve. I am okay.

But I look forward with these background people.

There is a problem with red tide here. B.C. had black drizzle. B.C. salmon were blinded by septic eye. This is very dangerous. Septic eye is caused by red tide.

• 2250

So I look forward today.... I have a letter from David Anderson. I have meetings going on with him and I don't have money for my lawyer. I found two lawyers. They are trying to tell me I have to come up with $5,000 for a deposit. It was $10,000, but they are making it half for me.

I'll be meeting in downtown Vancouver about my commercial fishing ground. I may have a short meeting with him on how we are going to control our B.C. waters again. Most of the bookwork is here at Canadian Fishing, and so is my manager, who understands all my work. I don't have a phone, but someone can contact him about where you can find me.

I'll be on the way home within two weeks. I'll be working with my people. On the way back I would like to have a final meeting up here.

The Vice-Chairman (Mr. Gary Lunn): Thank you, Mr. Tate.

The Chairman: Would you like me to have a look at these letters for you?

Mr. Philip Tate: I can read them. I can't hear you.

The Vice-Chairman (Mr. Gary Lunn): You're deaf?

The Chairman: I'll have a look at his letters. You continue.

Mr. Philip Tate: I handed over the paper with the workers on our committee.

Then they have a plan for an onshore dump site. It includes a pulp mill and natural gas facilities. It's very dangerous. We have problems in the Middle East, in Montreal, and it will make it worse. We have to stop before it's throughout B.C. It's there already. We don't have much time. There is not much time.

In downtown Steveston I had a meeting in the first week of December. I was out at 5.30 p.m. I walked out to the floats and I checked all the little boats where I used to tie up. Where I tied up, I saw something strange, my friend: a seagull black with oil; all black. It had watery eyes—very dangerous again; next to a septic eye.

These two are the worst things for our Pacific Ocean, and they are moving slowing. I call it “ebb”. It's sinking along the reef. It's sinking right now.

The Americans have been fishing at two points on the island. Next year the Americans will be fishing on the way back in the summer season. Our salmon will never enter the Skeena and Fraser. They are looking for inside passage through our Canada, in B.C. and the Fraser. We're looking for closure ourselves, the gillnetters. We worry about the boundary.

Stocks build back up in no time. We do a better job. It's better to fish on the way back. Isn't that right? That's true. We have to do our best for our rivers. We have to follow our rivers.

I know at Babine Lake today ice froze. It was at 40 or 50 below zero, it was so cold. My friend walked across to my house. In three minutes he was completely frozen.

• 2255

The best weather...the colder it is, the better the life you have from salmon. Today, when the salmon have been laying underneath the ice...the weather is very poor. He can't take his breath. He is waiting for cold Arctic weather, ice that thick—so thick that even a cement truck could almost drive across. Walking through the forest I've seen it myself.

When the weather gets that cold you can hear the ice bang. The Arctic salmon takes a small breath....

The Vice-Chairman (Mr. Gary Lunn): Mr. Tate, can you take those papers and give them to Mr. Baker. He will look at those with you.

Mr. Philip Tate: Okay. Thank you very much. I get too excited. No one is helping me.

The Vice-Chairman (Mr. Gary Lunn): I understand.

Mr. Philip Tate: It's okay with these people...but someone will help me. I have a meeting next week, and before I leave for home, within 10 days or three weeks, I will come back and complete our work, through Vancouver.

The Vice-Chairman (Mr. Gary Lunn): Thank you for your help.

Mr. Terry Slack.

Mr. Terry Slack (Director, Coastal Community Conservation Society, Steveston Branch): I'm a third-generation commercial fisher from the Fraser River. I'm a director of the Coastal Community Conservation Society, Steveston, and the Fraser River Sturgeon Conservation Society.

The map I've given you is the land stats map. It's a satellite map of the Fraser estuary. As a coastal community our group has a responsibility for the—-

The Vice-Chairman (Mr. Gary Lunn): Mr. Bernier if you could just try to keep the talk down a little bit at the back, it would be much easier for us to hear up here. Thank you.

Mr. Terry Slack: The map is a land stats map. It looks down over where we're sitting here today, in the estuary of the Fraser River. It's a good process.

I have another one here. The fisheries department should be looking at these kinds of ways of managing the fishery, by using a satellite and going throughout the estuary to check to see exactly how many estuary marshes we're losing. We're losing lots of them in the lower mainland here, which in the future is going to affect our ability to produce salmon in the lower end of the estuary.

I have another map of the North Arm. You'll notice on the top end of the map there's a small arm of the river called the North Arm. This is another satellite look at this part of the river. Approximately 12% to 20% of our downstream migrant salmon go down this part of the river—they call it the north fork of the Fraser River—but none come back. Between 12% and 20% of the fry go down, but there's only one commercial fisher fishing this massive length of the Fraser River.

Keep in mind that this river has now been declared dead by the Department of Fisheries and Oceans. There is no testing in this river by the Department of Fisheries and Ocean. They are doing absolutely nothing to rehabilitate this river at all.

As I pass this map around you'll notice the population of Vancouver; it's massive. If you take half of the houses on this map...in the morning they call it the first flush. It's when people go to the bathroom. The sewage treatment plant that is in the estuary, just off the mouth of the river, cannot handle the first flush in the morning. DFO calls it the first flush. They overload the sewage treatment plant. The North Arm is covered in sewage. Remember that 50% of the houses on this map discharge untreated sewage directly into the Fraser River.

This estuary has undergone massive man-made changes to the most important stage and life cycle of salmon. This part of the estuary is so important to salmon that all the fry we put into the estuary from Kamloops—you've heard the native people from Kamloops. All the fish they put in the estuary have to get through this part of the river and into what you would call a transition zone, which is a change from fresh water to salt water. They have to go out to the ocean and come back and be a part of all the communities' harvesting of salmon up and down the coast.

• 2300

The scientific experts in river ecology and river hydrology are having to consider some really serious questions about this estuary now. How much estuary salmon habitat do we require to support juvenile salmon, sturgeon, and to achieve sustainable populations for the future? That's important. If this part of the estuary doesn't work, we're never going to have enough salmon coming back to the Fraser system to have the three fisheries, the aboriginal, the commercial, the aboriginal food fishery, and of course the sports fishery.

If we don't get enough young fish out of this river in good shape for the North Arm, nothing comes back to the North Arm. We're putting 12% to 20% fry down the North Arm, and nothing comes back. That part of the river has been declared by DFO, not by regulations.... Nobody fishes there. One fisherman. In 1930 there were 400 fishermen fishing that section of the river you've just looked at.

The possibility today with the North Arm—they're saying we can engineer back our habitat, that we can actually rip out our sloughs, rip out our channels. The real critical issue here is that all this that goes on within the estuary, and especially the North Arm, is against the Fisheries Act of Canada. There was a slough called the McDonald Slough—you can see it there on the map in the right-hand corner. In 1962 this slough was actually closed by the Department of Fisheries. It's a migratory route of salmon, McDonald Slough, and they actually put a causeway across it and blocked the access of salmon, sturgeon, and oolichan into the North Arm of the Fraser River. This was an illegal act by the Department of Fisheries in 1962.

The question we ask ourselves is what are we doing here to protect what little is left? Well, in the North Arm we're doing nothing. In the main stem of the river, from New Westminster to Steveston, we'd better start doing something, because if we don't, we're going to have the same situation happen on the main stem of the Fraser, the South Arm.

As we look at these images again from space and see what changes we've done in the estuary, the question is what are the future consequences of all those jetties, all those training walls in the river? We've actually made this braided river into a channelized river. Now, in the future, we're going to see the effects of hydrology changes in the river, and there are a lot of hydrology changes taking place.

Our brief looks at the many problems that need to be addressed to achieve sustainability of the whole river system. Without a healthy, productive estuary we will certainly not have salmonid production that will satisfy all stakeholder groups. I repeat this: we have to satisfy all these stakeholder groups, and the only way we can do that is have a very productive estuary and a very productive river.

I'll go quickly through our brief. I'll take as little time as I possibly can.

This brief is submitted by the Coastal Communities Conservation Group, Steveston. We represent all the coastal communities up and down the coast. Our mandate is to look after this estuary. Steveston is located on the most sensitive productive fish habitat zone in the Fraser River. All coastal communities that harvest salmon bound for the Fraser River are dependent upon fish-rearing estuary habitat in the lower reaches of the Fraser, right here at Steveston. They are dependent on this habitat at Steveston. Our job as stewards of this habitat is to make sure you people understand that we are stewards; we are volunteer stewards. We are here to protect this part of the river.

As a community stakeholder group, our interests are strictly the preservation and restoration of juvenile salmon habitat. This evening I would like to discuss in detail our specific concerns with the present estuary management and the lack of action by DFO on federal scientific reports.

The question that always comes to my mind, when decisions are made about the estuary habitat, is who makes the final decision? Is the decision-making process open to all stakeholders? The Fraser River estuary management program, FREMP, which is funded by the federal government, the provincial government, and also by some other organizations who have vested interests in development in the river.... This is the only tool. The final decisions that are made in the estuary come out of FREMP, the Fraser River estuary management program. FREMP's responsibility is described as a cooperative effort among federal, provincial, and local governments to coordinate planning and decision-making on human activities in the estuary. A large document was put out—you people probably saw it—A Working, Living River. Well, you paid for it, so I should imagine you saw it.

• 2305

FREMP is funded by federal-provincial grants and receives extra funding from the two harbour commissions. Now we're getting down to the people who really are the people who are running this river, the two harbour commissions—the Fraser Harbour Commission and the North Fraser Harbour Commission. They have tremendous power in the estuary. They can override fisheries decisions. They develop the estuary in a money-minded type of way by leasing all the waterfront where the habitat is located. And they're funding FREMP. They're actually sitting on FREMP committees. They're actually advising different committees throughout FREMP.

The Fraser River management in the past has not encouraged stakeholder participation in decision-making. FREMP does not encourage people to sit in at their meetings. When you talk about it to the stakeholders of the river, the stakeholders think that this is a bureaucratic system and it's run by the province and the federal government. That's the attitude of the fishermen and the people who work on the log booms. They say this management program is not working. We have an arm that is dead, and the main stem of the river is under threat.

I have some examples of the track record of FREMP and its decision-making. In 1996 FREMP, with DFO, decided to redefine habitat protection in a sensitive red-coded habitat zone in the estuary. The revisions were to go from “no development” to “development may now occur in the estuary”. This is right from DFO. They changed it from development must not occur to development can occur. This is a 1996 decision by FREMP.

The new revisions also included a guideline, and this guideline was very specific. It said the guideline is for prospective shoreline developers in selecting development sites within the estuary. They actually went out and told developers, “Hey, come with me, we've got some nice plots on the edge of this river we'd like to see you develop”. This is right from FREMP. Reports by numerous scientists, including DFO biologist Colin Levings in 1989 and 1994, insist that these last highly productive riverfront zones be protected. Their own scientists told them to protect these habitat zones, as there are no more left. And FREMP said no, we've opened it up for development.

A study at this time in Oregon and Washington, when they were looking at changing the wording in habitat protection, said that after five years, extensive habitat replacement programs were not successful. FREMP is saying that if you develop a piece of red habitat zone, you have to try to restore it. Well, in Washington they tried that, but it didn't work. That came from a Washington report called Kintula - 1992. A scientific report said don't do that.

The Vice-Chairman (Mr. Gary Lunn): Mr. Slack, if I can just interrupt you for a minute, can you try.... We have your submission, what you're reading through now.

Mr. Terry Slack: Yes.

The Vice-Chairman (Mr. Gary Lunn): We definitely have the gist of your presentation on that North Arm of the Fraser.

Mr. Terry Slack: I have ocean dumping; I have contaminated sites on the lower Fraser; I have changes in the Fraser River system; and the most important one of all is gravel removal in the upper Fraser by DFO. They're taking out our spawning grounds near Hope. Now would you like to hear about it or not?

The Vice-Chairman (Mr. Gary Lunn): I guess the point I'm trying to make is we still have four or five more speakers, and if you could summarize that—

Mr. Terry Slack: Let me tell you about your habitat loss. Your spawning gravel at Hope right now is being removed. If you people let me spend five minutes, I'll tell you about it.

The Vice-Chairman (Mr. Gary Lunn): Yes. Thank you.

Mr. Terry Slack: Thank you very much. I'll continue, Mr. Speaker.

The Vice-Chairman (Mr. Gary Lunn): Thank you.

Mr. Terry Slack: We'll go right on to historic fish habitat, the flood plains in Hope. Historically, that part of the river had a large amount of habitat. It was 65,360 hectares. That was the historic amount of habitat in that part of the river when we could produce major runs of fish in the Fraser River. Present-day fish habitat up to Hope, in that reach of the river, is 7,319 hectares. That's how much we've lost, the difference between 7,000 and 65,000.

• 2310

The study also looked at a reach of the North Arm and it concluded that the historic wetland habitat consisted of approximately 2,896 hectares at the turn of the century. The present-day, or 1990, fish habitat—the stuff in that part of the river—consists now of only 109.2 hectares. We've gone from 2,896 hectares to 109.2 hectares of productive salmonid habitat. We've lost 96% of our habitat in that zone of the North Arm. That's absolutely unacceptable. DFO is responsible for this.

Also, in the North Arm they actually closed off an arm of the river and said, we're not going to let salmon up here any more, we're going to block it. I think I just mentioned it to you people. It was unacceptable. It was against the Fisheries Act in 1962. By 1989 most of the last remaining pockets of fish habitat in the North Arm were filled with sand, and industrial development took over the whole estuary and the upper reaches of the North Arm. In fact, there are 52 outfalls pouring chemicals and sewage into the North Arm today, and it starts with the University of British Columbia and it ends in New Westminster. Every one of the street ends, every one of the areas of the North Arm where there's opportunity to dump...well, they call the North Arm the ditch. That's what the fishermen call the river—the ditch.

As for ocean dumping in the Gulf of Georgia, we'll get to that right away. Environment Canada—that's DFO—manages Canada's disposal at sea program. In the Strait of Georgia near the Fraser River there are two sea disposal sites: Point Grey and Sand Heads. These sites are located in deep water and are within the migratory route and staging area of all our salmon that are coming back to the Fraser River.

In 1992 and 1993 numerous violations of dumping around these sites took place. DFO looked at them and made the public lay charges—made the public lay charges!—against a firm called Valley Towing. They made the public lay charges. They wouldn't lay charges.

These violations resulted in court action. This court action was very successful. Valley Towing went to court and lost the case and were fined more than $1 million. But it took the public to initiate the actual protection of the Fisheries Act. That is unacceptable.

Right now ocean dumping is taking place.... As we're talking here today, there are barge loads of toxic soil being dumped off the mouth of the Fraser River. When the salmon come back to spawn, they dump it directly on top of them. That is unacceptable! What is the DFO doing? Nothing.

Why are they not doing anything? Because the Ocean Dumping Control Act is a part of the federal government and they generate revenue from ocean dumping. So ocean dumping is a generating arm of the federal government and DFO sits back and says, well, generate some more money. They don't care about the fishery.

Contaminated sites on the Lower Fraser River: We have approximately seven in the North Arm that are leeching into the river today. We have an island in the North Arm called Chernobyl. That's the name of the island. Do you know why they call it Chernobyl? Because there's no more habitat or trees left on the island.

Tree Island on the upper reaches of the North Arm has been polluted by cyanide, by all kinds of chemicals, which have actually stripped the whole island, seven acres, of all the trees and vegetation. Did the DFO lay charges? No.

Numerous sites exist on the banks or near the Fraser River and some are suspected of leaching toxins. And there's one right now at the foot of Oak Street. It's an old site that sits right on the bank of the Fraser River, right in the junction between the Middle Arm and the North Arm. It's an old industrial site that's leaking toxins underground into the North Arm of the Fraser. Can you understand why there are no fishermen fishing in the North Arm, why there are no fish in the North Arm? Five sites! The DFO is monitoring the sites.

• 2315

All I can say about the toxins that are being put into the....

The real example of this is the Burns Bog. The Burns Bog is the biggest dump site in the main stem of the Fraser River. The Burns Bog now has a permit to put more dumping material on top of the bog.

Bogs along the Fraser are very important to salmonid production. They actually put cold water into the river in the summertime. As we get into El Niño situations, water temperatures rise in the summertime. So we've got to have our bogs. They're constantly pushing cold water into the stem of the river, giving the fish a chance to come in.

What is happening at Burns Bog? It is starting to leak. It's an old dump site by the city of Vancouver. It's starting to leak toxic chemicals.

DFO and Delta decided that they were going to stop it. They actually intercepted the chemicals that were coming out of the bog. They took those chemicals and pumped them to the Annacis Island treatment plant. Well, the Annacis Island treatment plant can't look after those chemicals. They discharge them to the river. So they go from the bog to the river via a pipeline. DFO said, “There's nothing wrong with that. We're treating the contaminants”.

Again, we have so many sites on the river that they're accumulative. If DFO is trying to treat them, I give them credibility. In some sites they use a bio-oxidization process whereby they try to cut down the amount of chemicals coming out.

A typical example would be Chatterton Petrochemical on the main stem of the river. That's a Dow Chemical site right on the bank of the river. It's been abandoned. When they took tests of the soil they found massive amounts of toluene and other hydrocarbons buried in the soil.

So DFO said, “Look, we have to do something about it”. So they made the company put up a bio-oxidization plant. But again they knocked down the chemicals to a level that was acceptable and then they pumped them to the river. So now we've got these sites being remediated, and remediation now means that you knock down the level of chemicals until it's acceptable and you pump into the river.

It's accumulative. If you've got five sites doing this, then you've got an accumulation of chemicals in the river.

Again, the conversion and replacement of a lower estuary natural marsh plant community is taking place at an alarming rate.

For thousands of years estuary salmon marsh productivity in the lower end of the river has been dependent upon healthy populations of native vegetation such as limby sedge and Carex lyngbei.

DFO scientists Grout, Levings and Richardson did a report on this. Let's have a look at what these people said. They're scientists from DFO.

In a science paper dated March 1997 these scientists identified that the introduced plant called purple loosestrife, Lythrum salicaria, was a serious threat to the future productivity of estuary marshes. The experiment noted that the decay rate of loosestrife was different from that of the Carex lyngbei, the plant that has supported all our marshes for thousands of years.

There's an invader coming into our marshes. It's called purple loosestrife. It's taking over the estuary. We're not sure if it's going to change the whole ecology of our marsh in the mouth of the river.

The scientists from DFO are saying, “This is quite serious. We should be doing something about it.” They report, and then they close the book. They say, “Well, let's wait and see if it destroys our habitat”.

All native sedges in the lower end of the Fraser are very important to our productivity of juvenile salmon in the estuary. We have to have them and we have to have them healthy. The department, by its own scientists, says, “There's something wrong. Let's get it fixed. Let's start doing something about it.”

A report came from the department approximately two weeks ago:

Purple loosestrife presently is responsible for the conversion of more natural wetlands in B.C. than any other human development impacts.

You looked at all the houses on that little map I passed around and you saw that there were a lot of people squashing into this estuary and around the Fraser River. Well, this plant is doing more damage than all this urban sprawl up the Fraser Valley. It's amazing. But that's right from their reports. DFO looks at this and says, “Well, we'll wait and see what happens.”

• 2320

Changes to the Fraser River. Since the turn of the century the Fraser River has undergone significant physical changes. If you look at the map you'll see all kinds of jetties and training walls, all kinds of things, built into this river that are having an impact on it. Lots and lots of reports are coming out of DFO.

Levings is one of their finest scientists. He says in the Levings report that “the consequences of training walls and jetties for aquatic habitat in the Fraser River...”. He's says “the consequences”. Why the hell did you let them build them to begin with? He says “the consequences”; that something is going to happen in the lower end of the Fraser River because we've built all these jetties and training walls. Something's going to happen to the ecology of the river, so let's do a report on it after the fact.

I'm getting very close to the end of my presentation.

Gravel removal in the Fraser. Gravel mining operations down river from Hope, in the main stem of the Fraser, supply aggregates for developments in the lower end of the valley. These riverfront and gravel bar operations have a major impact on the whole gravel bar reaches of the river. This gravel bar reach of the river—it's called a braided reach; it's down from Hope. There are a lot of channels with gravel bars. There's a push now to mine this gravel for use in the top end of the river.

The Department of Fisheries and Oceans regulates this gravel removal with permits and inspections. There is scientific concern today that the continued removal of the gravel in excess of annual recruitment—and that's what's happening; there's not a recruitment of gravel in the Fraser River. When you take it away, nothing comes back. The excess of annual recruitment will result in long-term deterioration of salmon, trout, and sturgeon habitat. This is what a scientist at UBC told DFO: please stop doing it.

The upper gravel reaches of the Fraser are heavily utilized by spawning chums and pinks. Approximately 80% of Fraser-bound chum and pinks spawn below Hope; 80% of our fishery spawns below Hope on those gravel reaches of the river. Can you see this? We're mining away the habitat of the salmon. Rearing of salmonid juveniles, particularly chinook, also occurs here. We're trying to protect chinooks in British Columbia, and we're mining away the only way for them to try to reproduce. We're taking it away and using it for cement in the lower end of the valley.

These gravel removal operations all run counter to current fisheries management policies, which recognize that to continue maintaining populations of all salmonids is dependent on maintaining the crucial habitat for salmon, sturgeon, and oolichan. DFO also recognizes in the Fisheries Act a no net loss of habitat policy. What do you call this? Of course, it's a net loss. You're taking away spawning grounds.

The sloughs and side channels below Hope are also utilized by white surgeon. I'm a director of the Fraser River Sturgeon Conservation Society. We're very concerned that we haven't even done any experiments. We don't know what our sturgeon do below Hope, and we're taking away possible spawning areas for white sturgeon. Our recruitment for white sturgeon in the Fraser River now is extremely poor. Right now the provincial biologists are looking at white sturgeon in these reaches of the river where they're taking the gravel out. It's unacceptable that federal scientists are saying, “Don't take the gravel out.” Provincial scientists are saying, “We've got sturgeon spawning grounds here; what are you guys doing?”

The potential spawning gravel continues to be removed as I speak today. One contract was let today by DFO for approximately a half a million yards of gravel. DFO signed the papers today. Is that acceptable?

Let's talk a little about who's responsible and who can stop the gravel removal. According to DFO, multinational cement companies and contractors are the ones requiring the gravel. It's Ocean Construction or other large, multinational gravel companies. They come to DFO and say, “We'd like some gravel.” They say, “Well, take away the salmon spawning grounds; they're sitting there.”

• 2325

I had a telephone call from a lawyer today. He found out something very interesting. In these gravel reaches of the upper Fraser River, 76.9% of the property...when the river drops, when the gravel bars are exposed, the actual owner of those gravel bars is not the federal government, it's the provincial government. Then the removal of the spawning gravel is the B.C. government's responsibility. It's up to Cathy MacGregor to stop this. Then when the water comes up and gets on top of the gravel bar we have a water column, and then the DFO is responsible. The federal government is responsible for the water column but not the spawning gravel.

So the provincial government has some responsibility here, and so does the federal government.

The next two contracts coming up are for massive amounts, over 3 million cubic yards. They have signed one today. Two more are coming.

If we let this happen, the people who are fishers here are going to find out that there will be no pink and no chum in the fall. Their gravel and their spawning areas will be gone.

We have to stop it, and the provincial and the federal governments are responsible; both of them. The people who spoke to you here today, the federal and the provincial people, are responsible for this.

In conclusion, there are many fisheries resource problems in and around the Fraser River. We have recognized only a few of them today. We have a lot more. I could speak another....

On water quality and in the North Arm, for instance, there were three water quality tests, one by the federal government, one by the provincial government, and one by FREMP. The one by the federal government said the water quality of the North Arm, which is sick.... When the man who swam down the Fraser went through there, he choked himself half to death. He said the water quality is extremely poor.

Let's see what these three studies on water quality had to say about the Fraser River. The federal one said the river is in poor condition and that it has some really serious problems. The provincial study says it's in fair condition; it doesn't have too many problems. The FREMP study said, well, it has a few problems, but they are not major.

These are scientific studies. The books are at home. You read them and you say to yourself, who should I believe? Which scientist or scientific authority should we believe here?

When I look on the bank of the North Arm and I see a sign, it says to have no contact with the water; no swimming, no bathing; and please don't let your dog in the water. That's how serious the water quality of the North Arm is.

As stakeholders in this resource, we all understand that good fisheries management must always be built on a foundation of sound ecological principles and sound scientific data; and I mean sound scientific data. We want to believe the scientists.

I would strongly support the immediate establishment of a new Pacific fisheries scientific conservation council, with all the appointed members completely independent of political or multi-stakeholder influences, a very important thing that we would like to see happen. Then we can believe what is happening to this river.

I thank you very much.

The Vice-Chairman (Mr. Gary Lunn): Thank you, Mr. Slack.

We now have John Maden.

Mr. John Maden (Chairman, Canadian Ocean Frontiers Research Initiative): Good evening. I'm willing to bet that when you signed your nomination papers you never expected to go to church on a weekday and hear 50 sermons at one time, 2 of them from ministers.

The Vice-Chairman (Mr. Gary Lunn): This is our second week at it.

Mr. John Maden: As you already gather, my name is John Maden. Just in case any of you had any illusions that I might be the football coach now negotiating a major contract, I'm sorry to say I'm not. I am, however, the chairman of something called the Canadian Ocean Frontiers Research Initiative.

I'm going to leave you with a five-page piece of paper. I don't know how anybody could be inspiring to you at this point, after you have spent a long day, and I'm very willing to trade off my speaking time against a sincere wish on my part that you take a look at what is there.

Basically, I'm delighted—we're all delighted—that your committee is taking a strong interest in research. That's point number one.

• 2330

Number two, I understand that one of the issues you've been looking at is whether the research side of the department should in some way be distanced from the remainder of the department. I have to tell you this really isn't my field. I'm like a fish out of water, in some sense. My real field is telecommunications, and I'm a research and development management consultant who is spending a lot of volunteer time on something that I really believe in very strongly.

If Northern Telecom were to tell their shareholders that they were taking their research and development arm and setting it over on one side and disassociating it, there would be a lot of unhappy shareholders. I would strongly urge you not to even think of having the research arm distanced from the management. They need more input from research, in my observation, and not less. And if you make it a somewhat arm's length organization, that's going to be difficult. There will be a division.

That's not to say there aren't some problems. Of course there are some problems, and one of the problems, which is almost unique to ocean science—I say “almost” because space science has the same situation—is that you virtually have a government monopoly on the science side.

If you look at pretty well all the other areas of endeavour where we're doing science, there's a pretty good competitive side about it, but there isn't in this. And that's because, with the exception of the oil industry—and the oil industry is not really present on this coast—there are no big organizations capable of doing substantial amounts of research, independent of government.

I believe very strongly, and indeed all those of us associated with COFRI—and we're a very representative group; I'll leave you with a list of our board members—believe very strongly that there needs to be not in any sense a weakening of the research and developments of DFO but some alternatives. There needs to be maybe 15% of a budget that you can get.... There are a lot of people out there with some very good ideas, and if you have only one person or one organization making the decisions, a lot of the things you need to do won't get done.

I think it's very important from a structural point of view and I really believe this committee can actually do something. It's difficult for anybody within the government to recommend something like this. You can, and you can do it in a non-partisan way, and I think it's extraordinarily important.

To get your attention a little bit, I'm going to leave with you a paper I've called “Millions Wise, Billions Foolish”. When you think about it, that's true. We have a billion-dollar TAGS program. Everybody is talking about that; that's an easy one to hit. But I would love to able to stand up here and say, gee, if only we'd done more science we wouldn't have been there. Now, that's true, but the trouble is nobody can stand up and tell you, well, if we had spent another $50 million we wouldn't have had the TAGS problem, or if we had spent another $100 million or whatever.

The problem in this area is so huge, we know so little about the ocean—it's often said we know less about the ocean than we do about the surface of the moon, and it's true. It's a hell of a lot harder to collect data underneath the ocean than it is to fly a satellite over the top of the moon and look at the surface. Actually, I suspect—I've never looked at the figures—we may have spent quite a lot more money too in getting a look at the surface of the moon than we've spent on the ocean.

There are methods around, and some of them are being developed right here in British Columbia, that can cut the cost of data collection by factors of 10 and more, and we have to do that.

There are lots of analogies. One of the ones I like is that if you said to a guy, “Here's an oxcart. You go off and tell me all about British Columbia; do a survey of British Columbia and come back and tell me about it”—well, that's about the level of our investigations.

We used to have six ships on this coast for deep ocean research in 1979 or so. Two of them were weather stations and they collected data on and off, and the rest were for proper deep ocean research. We now have one. There's been some kind of deal with the coast guard, and we don't quite know what's going to happen now with those ships being merged, but basically we have one. We can't afford to collect data with ships. We have to be much more innovative.

• 2335

Those are the major points I want to leave with you.

I really am serious when I say we are being millions wise and billions foolish. It isn't just TAGS. We know we've got enormous problems with our coastal communities. We have representation from the coastal communities association on our board and we're looking to see what we can do. Those people need to have an independent.... They've got lots of ideas of things they'd like to try, and they need to have some money. They can find some money that they can match. They need to have somewhere where they can go to get some of these ideas worked with.

We're all talking about global warming. That's a billion-dollar program. The oceans are hugely involved and we're just terribly underinvestigating it. I say we need to spend another $10 million a year out here, and probably similar amounts or more on the Atlantic coast, with these kinds of alternative organizations. People say, that's a lot of money. Well, yes, maybe, but we've been spending something like $100 million on a tobacco advertising program and then we're going out and doing some other things.

That's basically the message I want to leave with you. It's pretty simple. I'd love to talk to you about it some more. You're probably too tired to do much more today, but if you want to, any of us....

We have a number of scientists involved with this program. We do work with DFO scientists. We don't want to be confrontational. We work very much with DFO. We have provincial government representatives on our board. We think it needs some strong voices to say, hey, we really are not paying attention.

With that, gentlemen, thank you very much.

The Vice-Chairman (Mr. Gary Lunn): Thank you, sir.

I will go through these names before you start. Homer Stevens, Pat Young and Gordon Kibble are all here.

I appreciate that you people all want your time and you all want your time to be heard, and we are going to hear you. We're going to have a few more.

I'll be honest. We're losing steam up here. We're trying to keep people to five minutes. We started trying to do that in the middle of the day. If you could try to keep your comments brief, the written information will get looked at and I trust you'll gain our attention a lot more if you can cut to the chase and really get to your message. We will look at the written information over the next few months when we compile a report. I thank you for your assistance in this matter.

We'll hear from Harold Steves.

Apparently we missed you, so we'll hear from you. If you can try to keep your comments to five minutes, that will be much appreciated.

Mr. Harold Steves (Individual Presentation): I certainly appreciate what you're doing. I'm on the Richmond City Council and I just spent the last four hours in a public hearing doing exactly what you're doing, so you've got my sympathy.

As I mentioned, I'm a member of the Richmond City Council. I'm also the south coast representative on the groundfish development authority and part of the Coastal Community Conservation Society.

Some of you have seen the red paper. This was originally prepared by the Coastal Community Conservation Society regarding a major problem we have here on our waterfront. I'll talk about that in a minute. If you can find it, I want to comment on it.

It was interesting to hear David Anderson earlier. I'm going to have a few good things to say about the Liberal government. Unfortunately, it's the Liberal government 30 years ago, but I hope that what I'm going to say will apply to the present one and we can have some help.

David mentioned that his grandfather owned one of the canneries on the waterfront, and we're faced with a real problem in this harbour today.

The red paper I've given out shows basically the B.C. Packers site. Somebody earlier this evening talked about B.C. Packers building a cannery in Alaska and buying Canadian fish more cheaply from Alaskans and then canning it as Canadian fish.

They're able to build a cannery in Alaska because they're selling their property here in Steveston. They built the Imperial cannery here in 1903. They've been operating it ever since. They have 30 acres. It's zoned industrial, worth $15 million. Right now they're in the process of getting it re-zoned and it will be worth $50 million. They're trying to remove the fishing industry from this harbour. That's what Galen Weston is doing to us when he buys our fish and cans them in Alaska. It's a very serious concern to this community and I'd very much like to have your help.

• 2340

I have some comments on the previous Liberal government. It's strange the tenacity of the fisher folk in this community. Back in 1968, Steveston Harbour was totally under the control of a handful of canning organizations. The fishermen couldn't get independence, so we organized a waterfront task force. Strangely enough, my father chaired it. The task force asked for some independence to have a fish boat harbour, moorage, and an offloading facility. We wrote to Jack Davis, who was Minister of Fisheries. Davis was enthusiastic about it. He actually had a study done by the department of fisheries economics branch. They did a study for the total lower mainland region and decided that a major unloading facility was necessary to provide fish to smaller processing plants for frozen and fresh fish markets.

Davis actually then went ahead and they acquired part of the waterfront. They built the Third Avenue piers, just down from here, the fish boat moorage, and they purchased the land to build the unloading facility. Unfortunately, there was a change of government. When Mulroney's government came along the first thing they did was put it up for bid to the private sector, and what were to be fishermen's services, an unloading facility, and a public market ended up being a private waterfront development.

We have been in limbo ever since, because there was no place for the moorage expansions that would have provided such facilities. Under the Mulroney government we ended up with a small craft harbours branch and the Steveston Harbour Authority becoming a monopoly of their own. We ended up with monopoly control of this harbour by both the federal government, under the small craft harbours branch, and B.C. Packers. The federal government small craft harbours branch, after the change in government, refused to even talk to the community. We used to have meetings in the hall next door with 300 or 400 people. They would come and talk to us and we'd make group decisions. We'd be heard. But as soon as there was a change in government, we had a tremendous change in the attitude of DFO and the small craft harbours branch.

I think others may have told you or may tell you about them. I'm not going to go any further, but I have documents going back for the last 10 or 15 years showing how this community has been dealt with by that federal agency. I hope you will make some changes.

We now have an opportunity once again to carry through with the vision that Jack Davis and the Liberal government had some years ago for this harbour. With the removal of B.C. Packers from the scene.... They've shut down their cannery.

I must say something else before I get into this. I worked for B.C. Packers. I've fished in this river. I guess I was the last person out when they shut down the Phoenix Cannery in 1968. I've seen at least 2,500 people lose their jobs over the years. The canneries have been in operation for 100 years. There were 23 of them. Up until last year there was one; now there are none.

With B.C. Packers moving out, however, we have an opportunity to try to do what Davis had intended to do some years ago. I'll give you my notes on it. The DFO economic branch report indicated that one of the holdbacks in getting an offloading facility and revitalizing this harbour was that there wasn't the land and the buildings available. Interestingly enough, the historic cannery buildings—and there are four major ones in good condition in this harbour along a half-mile stretch of B.C. Packers property—are on crown land. When B.C. Packers has their upland rezoned for residential, that land reverts to the crown.

The provincial government is actually the crown owner. The federal government actually has the head lease on the land, the intertidal land where the cannery buildings are. I think we have an opportunity now to take those buildings, particularly the Brunswick Cannery, which is just at the foot of number one road, and build the unloading facility that was once envisioned. If we don't do it, this harbour as a fishing community is dead. Believe me, it won't take long. Up until now, B.C. Packers did some unloading and some processing. Now there is no unloading and no processing. DFO only provides services for boat repairs. All of the industrial areas in this community are up for residential redevelopment, so dozens and dozens of small businesses that service the fleet will be gone and will have no place to relocate if B.C. Packers rezoning goes ahead. There will be nobody to repair engines, nobody to repair the gurdies and the gear and that sort of thing that the boats need. One of the deep-sea trawlers gets a refit at Anacortes Island already.

• 2345

We've been discussing what to do with this particular waterfront property, and the deep sea trawlers, who probably spoke to you earlier today, have come up with one solution. They have 10 to 12 boats committed, such that if we have an unloading facility, they will unload some 34 million pounds of groundfish a year. That's where I come in as a member of the groundfish development authority, because I know the quotas and I know the companies that process that groundfish; and believe it or not, fellows, most of them are right here in Richmond. We have at least a dozen processing plants in Richmond and Delta; but most are in Richmond. One of the processing plants in Delta, Lions Gate, does offload from the groundfish trawlers, but the harbour is so narrow and so full of pleasure craft that the captains are afraid to take their boats in for fear of crunching some.

We hear a lot about fish being sold to the States. That's one of the reasons why our trawling fleet goes to Bellingham. Now, I didn't know this when I got on the groundfish board and we were trying to set quotas to encourage coastal communities and development of the coastal communities, but what this community needs is an offloading facility so we can bring those boats home.

I won't go into too much more detail on it, other than to say the map I've given you is one that was prepared originally by the Coastal Communities Conservation Society. It's endorsed by just about every fisheries group in the harbour: the deep sea trawlers, the independent fishermen, the fishermen's union, CFDC, the Britannia Heritage Shipyard Park, and various others.

You may have heard earlier, as a matter of fact, that the Britannia Heritage Shipyard society is trying to set up a training program to retrain fisher folk for other jobs; the displaced fishermen and shore workers. One of the things they have been retraining them in is heavy timber construction, rebuilding piers and docks at the Britannia shipyard, which will be an operating shipyard. Basically, what we're looking at in this harbour is if some of these buildings are refurbished, we would be able to use fishermen trained under these programs to rebuild and repair the facilities and then we would be able to train people to run and operate them as well, whether it's for public or for private business. We envisage quite a few private businesses would want to establish here as well.

The big roadblock is our good friend Galen Weston, because they want to put a covenant on the property to prevent this property from ever being used by the fishing industry again. They haven't said that, but every time we've suggested their half mile of waterfront—even just the water's edge—should be fishing industry industrial, they get very upset and they talk about converting it to pleasure craft and maybe having a couple of floats for the fish boats but no services, onshore or offshore, that would actually keep the fleet here.

I urge you to take a look at the evidence I give you. I have a number of briefs. I have the briefs from the economics branch of the DFO saying that in 1985, with only 20 million pounds, an offloading facility was feasible. With 34 million pounds and at least 15 more boats, plus halibut, tuna, and all the other fish landed along this coast from deep sea boats and inshore boats, I think an offloading facility is crucial.

If you want to help coastal communities, you sure need to help this one, because the life of our coastal community is at stake. It has been here for 100 years, but it won't last much longer beyond 1998, when the final rezoning process at city hall goes through, if B.C. Packers has its way. Please help us. We're desperate.

The Vice-Chairman (Gary Lunn): We now have Mr. Homer Stevens.

Mr. Homer Stevens (Past President, United Fishermen and Allied Workers Union): Mr. Chairman and members of the committee, I don't know whether this is a process of exhaustion or of starvation for you and for us who are sitting here.

The document I just submitted to you is something that was presented on behalf of the fishermen of British Columbia in 1974-75. It has to do with what we called then and call now the sell-out of our salmon resources.

• 2350

I'm kind of alarmed at the way the committee has had to proceed with the time factors. Having presented the fishermen's point of view over the last number of years, going back to 1953, when I first attended a meeting of the standing committee on fisheries in Ottawa, it seems to me that one of the factors is for the committee not just to hear the witnesses, but to ask them questions, put them on the spot. I know I certainly was. And I appreciated what was being done, no matter how my temper may have been boiling underneath. At least it forced me to learn what the understanding was on the part of the members of the committee of what I was saying and what the brief contained. And I think it forced the members of the committee to think about how to trip me up, and any other witnesses.

I think the way it goes is that witnesses in this kind of a hearing don't really know whether they are having any impact or not. It is all very well to say, as has been said here over and over again, leave the documents and we'll read them. But you know when you go back to Ottawa you'll have a whole bunch more documents to read. Most of the record that is here might be totally wasted. I hope not.

On the whole question of Canada's fishing plan, I have in front of me here a Canada-first fishing plan, drawn up this year, on July 18, by a technical working group that represented the federal government along with the provincial government. It has a number of points about the objectives and the principles and how we're going to protect Canada's interests in the salmon fisheries of the Pacific. I am not going to try to look at them or deal with them in detail. But none of that came to pass—none of it. It might as well have been thrown in the garbage can the day it was printed. Instead of standing up and protecting the Canadian fishermen as well as the Canadian resource, the right of the Canadian people to harvest their own salmon, what did we have? Caving in and backing down, and letting the thing roll on as if nothing happened.

The tempers of the fishermen were up. I was in Prince Rupert. I have been a hell-raiser I guess since I was born. I think the last time somebody referred to me that way was Roméo LeBlanc when I was retiring as president of the fishermen's union to go back fishing. He said I was something like an eel in the barrel. The cod fishermen on the east coast put an eel in the bottom of the barrel where the fish were alive and the eel kept them alive. I think he meant it as a compliment. I took it to be that.

I presented you with a pamphlet called “Stop the Sell-out”. Some of the statements that have been made here already have dealt with the fact that we are supposed to have the right to harvest the salmon that are spawning in Canadian rivers up into the Yukon and northern British Columbia behind the Alaska panhandle. You have heard that testimony. If you open that up, you will see that there is a draft. It shows the rivers that flow in. What happened to that? We got it started by pressure on the late James Sinclair back in the 1950s to start a fishery with the use of the resource that was there, utilizing the skills and knowledge of the aboriginal peoples who lived behind the Alaska panhandle itself in the Stikine and the Taku, only to have somebody pull the rug out from under that. They withdrew it.

We have the right to go up Clarence Strait right into the Stikine River by old treaties between Canada and the United States. So we were using that plus air transportation to get the fishermen and the equipment into the area and to fly the fish out.

That is bad enough that it should have been pulled out by a later government, but when we were talking to the Americans in 1974—and I was at a number of those meetings—we had the Canadian government representative withdraw our rights to the fisheries in behind the panhandle. We gave up that whole area where we can put the pressure on the Americans to bring them to the bargaining table with the desire to settle with us.

• 2355

If you want to look back in the record, you will find that Jimmy Sinclair at least had the guts to say to the Americans back in the 1950s that if you don't like the way it's happening now, we'll show you what really happens, and he gave us 300-fathom 90-mesh gillnets in Juan de Fuca Straits and gave the seiners 350 fathoms where it was only a 250-fathom limit and gave us seven days a week fishing to put the Americans in the position that we were in, where they were taking two-thirds of our pink salmon bound for the Fraser and then telling us to conserve them after that. He had the guts to do that.

He wanted us to fish seven days a week. Incidentally, we didn't. He took a whole bunch of members of Parliament out to sea fishing on a weekend and the whole fleet was tied up. He raised hell with me afterwards. He said he was trying to put on a show. I said why didn't you ask us. Five days is enough, gentlemen. We can catch the fish and we can put the pressure on the Yankees in that respect.

If we go back and cancel that bloody surf line that we agreed to so placidly in 1957, with Alaska refusing to produce its charts, just think of it. We drew in our net fisheries so that we couldn't set a net without a horse and wagon to try to go out on the beach and set them. Look at what we call the surf line, what we call the blue line, that goes along the coast of British Columbia. It goes down off the states of Washington, Oregon, and California. So we weren't going to be pushing our nets further out to sea to catch fish that have tails and swim right back to the rivers they came from. But Alaska, well, they didn't have any charts.

I was sitting at the table with the deputy minister, George Clark, and I said don't sign anything or agree to anything unless they produce the charts where they are going to draw their surf line. He said “You're too suspicious, Homer”. Well, it all came to pass. They drew a headland-to-headland line, similar to what Iceland did in the first cod war, and then went three miles outside of that, giving themselves territory running up to twenty miles offshore in some parts of the Alaska panhandle to fish in. That's what gives them the present advantage.

We have the right to say we won't abide by a surf-line agreement when they won't abide by their side of the treaty, and we'll go offshore as well as inshore and catch those salmon—not in order to destroy the salmon run, but to destroy the idea in the minds of the Alaska government and the federal government of the United States that they can do that with us and we'll conserve all those fish for them, for Uncle Sam, for the workers of Uncle Sam.

Now as far as the workers are concerned, I have relatives all the way down to California, some in the state of Washington. I have all kinds of friends in Alaska. I don't think it's a quarrel between the fishermen of Canada and the fishermen of the United States. I know that it is not by any means that, because I was up fishing right on the Alaska border last year and heard the American fishermen talking about who is next. If what is being done here has already been done off the states of California, Washington, and Oregon, who is next? It will be Alaska. The fish wheels will turn. B.C. Packers, Canadian Fishing, Allied Pacific Processors, who are building plants in Alaska and building other plants here and there to process fish—what are they concerned about? Are they really concerned?

Somebody here before me said the processors should be told to do the processing and have a special forum for them to present their cases, and they should have absolutely nothing to do with what we have to do to earn a living catching fish. That isn't going to happen. I know damned well it isn't going to happen, and you guys know it's not going to happen. But at least provide the opportunity for the fishermen themselves and their families and the people who have worked in these plants and who have built the industry to get through somewhere to Ottawa and say it's time they sat down and listened to us. We're not going to have very much progress unless that happens.

• 0000

I think a new agreement can be reached, but it has to be built on the precepts of the old. In 1971 we worked out an agreement that contains the basic principles, which you'll see on the back page of this, of what can be done. It also has to do with the other aspects of it, of what we agreed to.

I came back from the meetings in Seattle and travelled all over the coast of British Columbia, to the places I knew and a lot of places I didn't know, because fish boats took me to some of the holes and caps and stuff. They wanted a report. I said that the 1971 agreement, which was worked out between the two governments—Dr. Alfred Needler, the Deputy Minister of Fisheries, was conducting it for Canada—was the kind of agreement we could live with forever as far as dividing salmon resources was concerned.

Well, the ink wasn't very dry on that before the Americans tried all kinds of ways to get out from under. I attended the 1974, 1975 and 1976 Law of the Sea Conferences and watched the Americans screaming like hell about the fact that the Japanese or the Russians might be intercepting some of their fish in the Bering Sea. They never did sign the Law of the Sea, as far as I know—unless somebody informs me now that they signed the deal—but they used that in terms of defending the Alaska interests and, at the same time, turning it around the other way and saying, we have the right to harvest Canadian salmon because we provide some feeding grounds in the high seas. They know that's a piece of hypocrisy.

They'll come to the bargaining table when and if we put that kind of strategy together, but I challenge not this committee but the government and the opposition of the government to put some concept on the table that will bring the Americans back. I read the newspapers, I listen to the stuff on television. I've been keeping clippings, piles of it and piles of it, and the Americans are not prepared to sit down at the table now. They are not going to do a damned thing unless they see pressure that will make them talk.

We'll have no problem talking to our American cousins on the fishing grounds or anywhere else. Oh, sometimes, yes, because some of them have suggested to me on the fishing grounds, well, cousin, why don't you let us do this and that and the other thing having to do with fishing in the province of British Columbia or off B.C. shores? I say, look, cousin, why don't you go down and rip out some of those dams on the Columbia River? Why didn't you do something to restore Oregon and California in terms of salmon? I think that's your responsibility.

We can't tell the great United States what to do if they want to build atom bombs or put nuclear submarines in our waters, but at least you have some pressure you might bring to bear in that respect, having to do with rebuilding the salmon stocks. When they are rebuilt...the Columbia River has even greater spawning grounds, and not all of them in Canada—some in Canada—than the Fraser River has.

On the question of rehabilitation, I have a microscopic view of it. As part of this program by the Department of Fisheries, I recall when in 1973 Roméo LeBlanc and Dave Barrett announced a $350 million program for enhancement. I remember before that there was a study by the Department of Fisheries and Oceans showing that it took $265 million a year for a few years to rebuild them. That was in the 1960s.

Now you're talking about, what, $30 million, $60 million? Put that back in terms of the dollars that are required and you'll need at least half a billion dollars. And put that to both the provincial and federal governments and say, how much of that are you going to spend to return the salmon habitat?

I happen to live now on Lasqueti Island, about fifty miles from here, and I worked with seven other people helping to restore one stream. Before we got going, I got a copy of a report that was drafted and printed in 1992 jointly by federal and provincial authorities. There are no salmon on Lasqueti Island. There are no anadromous trout or anything else on Lasqueti Island.

• 0005

So my wife and I had to go out and catch some cohos in the lake on Lasqueti Island, a few more than we wanted to—ten of them were dead and the other nine were alive—that I let go, in order to prove to them that there are cohos there. We saw groups of 50 or 60 or 100 alevins, just come out of the egg stage, and had to bring them over in glass jars and have these people from Fisheries and Oceans asking if those were salmon and what kind of salmon they were. Then they got out a great big book to see what they were. I said, they are chums. We also had coho.

That's bad enough, but when it comes to doing anything now, guess what we're told. It's that there isn't any more money. You might get a few dollars putting in the eggs that are coming over from Qualicum on Vancouver Island to come in, 50,000 coho eggs, but you are not going to get any chum eggs. We don't know whether we're going to get any smolts.

That is just a tiny particle of what is going on all along this coast. If we want to rebuild, as so many people have said here, we can use the fishermen. We can use the shoreworkers and the tender crews and the packermen and their families and communities to go to work and rebuild the streams. But you cannot do it all with rocks in your hands.

We were lifting rocks in order to build a retaining system to hold some water for the summer. We couldn't get a bulldozer or anything else to come down and help us. There are 12 more streams we want to do. Just think of the streams from here to Prince Rupert and beyond. It is possible. If there is a will to do it, then there is a way to do it.

I think you gentlemen know that.

If they want to build another monument in terms of buildings like they have in Hull now to house DFO.... I don't know what the hell was wrong with the ones before. There was all kinds of space in them. I had to walk for miles to find one end and the other. Now they want another one. Pretty soon they will want another one.

Then you've got 2,400 people working in British Columbia, 2,300 at 555 West Hastings in downtown Vancouver, behind locked doors. Go out and find out how many people from DFO are on the grounds, are out doing some work. Maybe a dozen.

On the last point, I just want to say that there is more I can tell you if you want to get in touch with me. I am sure you know my address or you can find it. There is only one of me in Canada.

I want to say something about an issue here that hurts me more than it hurts some of the people that were here.

There is an old story about dividing and ruling. The companies have played that all the time. I want to say that the remaining few that are here now.... We would never have had a chance to get anything, we would never have had unemployment insurance, workers' compensation on the boats, we would never have had a damned thing that was worth while if we didn't have the coordination of all of us, whether we happen to be aboriginal or not. I am not disgusted, but I feel sick when I hear people, some of them my brothers in the fishermen's union, ranting and raving about the aboriginal fishery, not realizing there is a day now in which there is going to be a state-to-state or nation-to-nation discussion.

We're not giving something back. We're not giving it back to the one-quarter of me or what I've seen of genocide in my own family on the aboriginal side. We are recognizing that in history the three-quarters that is of me as well as it is of you have come into this country and taken it away from people who were otherwise quite capable of looking after themselves and would have had a hell of a lot better life if we had never got here. We are at least recognizing that for once they have the aboriginal title and the right to be treated as people who have a desire to stand up for themselves.

• 2410

Whatever else might be said, I won't have any part of what the United Fishermen and Allied Workers Union might say, or what the coalition might say, or any other coalition that does not recognize at least that we have to look into our history and find out what it's about.

Given that the universities have misled us, given that the churches have misled us, given that the politicians have misled us, we have to be responsible for our own destiny. I hope that sooner or later people will begin to do that in this industry as well as everywhere else.

It is not a question of their not having a right. They have every right. At one time I was proud to be a member of a union and to be speaking for a union that advocated recognition of aboriginal title and serious negotiation. I'm not so sure that is the case today.

The Vice-Chairman (Mr. Gary Lunn): Thank you, Mr. Stevens. I do sincerely thank you for your comments.

Just to give you a 30-second response, you said we usually ask questions. We always do, but the House is not sitting and the members are supposed to be in their ridings. This committee is very active and wanted to come to British Columbia. We are trying to visit 10 communities and listen to as many people as possible. If we asked questions, we would never, ever get to the people. We almost had to gag these guys and tie them up and tell them they are not allowed to talk for 10 days, which is a tough task in itself.

But when we listen to people like you...you can rest assured that with the information you have provided us, some of us will be getting back to you. We are getting a wealth of information. It's not that we are not interested; we have just been sitting here for seven hours. It was a great presentation, and I thank you for that.

Mr. Homer Stevens: My 30-second response is this. I was told outside the door by one of the others that this is because you're travelling. I want to say to you that there was a committee of this kind that travelled to only five towns, but they did it the way it should be done, quite a few years ago in the days when Senator Ray Perrault was very active, Paul St. Pierre and a number of other people. I followed them around to every meeting—Prince Rupert, Kamloops, Sidney, Vancouver—and saw that they did it that way, and not because I said so but because that's the way to do it.

I think what has to be done, if you're really going to come to grips with this, is that you will have to organize another series very quickly where you do it that way, where people can come, say their piece and be cross-examined, where you can discuss it and go into it. This is educational and it's a good start. I hope it broadens into more. I might even follow you to Campbell River.

The Vice-Chairman (Mr. Gary Lunn): Thank you. Your point is well taken.

Mr. George S. Baker (Gander—Grand Falls, Lib.): Mr. Chairman—

The Vice-Chairman (Mr. Gary Lunn): No, you're not being recognized. I just said you're not allowed to talk.

Mr. George Baker: I just wanted to mention to the people here that the last time I met Homer Stevens was many years ago. I was the parliamentary secretary at the time, Homer, to Roméo Leblanc. I remember when they sent Homer to the United Nations in New York. Lo and behold, the result was that Canada finally announced that it was going to get tough with foreign nations and declare the 200-mile zone in 1977. I think Homer had a lot to do with that.

The Vice-Chairman (Mr. Gary Lunn): Touché! I think we had better get Homer elected as an MP and bring him to Ottawa. We need you down there.

Do we have Pat Young? I won't even ask you to stick to five minutes. I can't any more. You can sit down when you're finished.

Mr. Pat Young (Individual Presentation): Equal opportunity. I am going to try to be as brief as possible. I think we have listened to a lot of submissions tonight.

I think the problem here is very simple. There is one product and it is called the fish, and those fish have to be conserved.

There are two ways to conserve them: the short term and the long term. I don't think the short term is going to save my job. I would like to stand here and say to you guys that I'll be fishing in 10 years, but as a businessman, I don't think so. I don't make enough money. You've heard some of the numbers today. If you were living on $8,000 a year and running a boat that cost $10,000 to $15,000 a year—and that's not even including the mortgage on a home or on the boat or gear changes that DFO drops on us periodically—you couldn't stay in this business.

• 0015

As one of the young guys from the DFO said, he might be a millionaire. Well, I hate to sound condescending, but I was almost a millionaire and now I'm almost ready to walk away from everything I own. I have a wife of 25 years and she looks at me, scratching her head. We're going to lose everything we have.

You have to change the way you think. So I'll change the way I think and I'll put the question to you.

Short term, the first thing that has to happen is that owners own their boats and the fishers fish them, which means no more armchair fishers. Only the fishermen have the right to fish in Canadian waters—and make those guys Canadians. That's lesson one.

As for the short term, we have two stakeholders eating fish out there. First we have the mammals or the human beings. We also have seals and sea lions out there. There are 130,000 out there. How about a seal cull? I can't believe that has not even been brought up today in this meeting; and I'm probably going to be the last speaker here.

Obviously I'm not afraid of what the world thinks when we kill seals off in B.C. I'm worried about killing a complete community infrastructure up and down this coast.

We have a producer on this coast right now that probably owns—I don't know if this can be proven—50% of the seine boats, indirectly or directly. That has to stop. We can't have a producer also controlling the fleet. This is how they can manipulate prices. They know darn well they don't have to pay another fisherman on this coast. They know their boats are going to get those fish. You can't have that. That has to stop.

The way we do business in Canada has become so archaic and so ridiculous that I am just disgusted by the way we Canadians do business in the world. As fishermen in the protests we had up in Alaska, for the first time in my life we Canadians stood up to the Americans and said no, we are not going to take it any more.

Where were our leaders? Where was our political will? Axworthy was in Washington. I don't know if he was on his knees or not. Mr. Anderson was lost off in Newfoundland, I guess, in a fog. For four days we fishermen in Prince Rupert had to put up with relentless stupidity from media that would not report the truth.

The truth is mismanagement by DFO. It is so plain, gentlemen, it's like your nose. It's there. You can't miss it. It's there. It is so blatantly obvious. But none of these things are ever addressed.

How obvious is it? Well, I'll make it easy. We fishermen have been forced to reduce by two-thirds of an area to try to make a living. Why didn't they reduce their licence fee two-thirds? Doesn't it make sense? You take away two-thirds of a gentleman's area, okay, you take away two-thirds of his licensing fee. That never happened.

The other thing that doesn't make sense is why eight different areas were created in the salmon industry. We have three gillnet, three troll, and two seine areas. Well, jeepers, guys, we've just been told by one of the earlier speakers that ten seine boats could eradicate every sockeye or chum or pink on this coast. Where is the rationale? Back to mismanagement.

The other point on the short term is that we fishermen are also at fault. We're greedy. There is greed involved. Yes, there is greed. Some of us seem to think we have to make a lot of money every year. I don't stand in front of you gentlemen and try to tell you I'm not greedy. The older I get.... I've raised two children, and I look at what I'm going to pass on to them. What I'm going to pass on to them is not what I was born into. When I was a young man I watched my dad fish in this river. We used to fish for six months. I can remember watching the sunset on my dad's boat and the feeling I had.

My son is 22 years old right now. He doesn't have that opportunity. In fact, I'm glad he's where he is right now. He has a shore job in some sweatshop trying to make enough money so he can pay off his first car loan.

• 0020

So what I'm looking at in this submission is one thing. The stakeholders have not had a say in this thing from the beginning to the end. Nobody in Ottawa has listened to what we've tried to tell them. The native people have tried to tell them, the elders, old retired fishermen. This whole community, B.C., has tried to get DFO to listen to what is going on. They don't care, gentlemen. They don't want to care.

I'll tell you why. It's very simple. There is a power in this world called MAI. All they want to do is eradicate the number one thing in the water. If you eliminate the stocks, once the fishermen are gone, dam the damn thing and shift the water south. If you believe in that, then I would suggest you do some research and give me a call.

A lot of people think I'm absolutely insane, but I couldn't care less. The one thing about being a fisherman is that you're the captain of your own boat. You don't have to kiss anybody's cheeks and you work as hard as you have to in order to survive. But what I'm tired of is carrying government bureaucracy on my back.

Gentlemen, you are part of a government right now.

I notice the Liberals have left; I don't know if there's a reason for that.

If there's one Liberal left, put your hand up. Is there one? Thank you, sir. Okay, two.

In closing, I want you to understand that there have to be short-term and long-term processes. I don't think it's going to happen. I don't think the federal government is sincere. It's never been sincere. We've had three fisheries ministers who basically have sold us out. They've tried to put nails between us and pegs between us. They've tried to use the pilot sales, you name it. Smokescreens.

All we fishermen in Canada and B.C. want is to do our job. We know how to do our job. I don't want to be retrained to learn how to run a computer. If I took my glasses off, I couldn't see the stupid thing.

I might add another thing. I'm 48 years old and I want to be a fisherman. I'm not afraid. I've had five starving years. What's five more? What I want to know is, am I going to get DFO out of my net to allow me to catch some sockeye?

Thank you very much.

The Vice-Chairman (Mr. Gary Lunn): Somehow I think, Mr. Baker, we got the speaking list backwards. We've got all the great speakers at the end, whereas we should have had them here when the media were here. We would have made the six o'clock news.

I'm going to call on Mr. Kibble. Are you here?

I'm starting to wake up. We could go on for a couple of more hours now.

Mr. Gordon Kibble (Individual Presentation): Thank you. I hope you'll give me the five hours you gave everybody else.

I'm not going to read directly from my presentation, but I will speak on what is contained in it. What I would like you gentlemen to do is to look at the brochure as I talk about what I'm going to talk about.

Today I'd like to talk about something that is missing and has been missing for several years now, and that is cooperation.

In order for us to preserve fish and fish stocks, we must all cooperate together, whether it be on the federal, provincial or the local level. So far I have not seen that happen. I would like to point out three examples that have come forth within the last year.

Our first example comes at the end of a four-year campaign to save a local heritage building for use as an estuarine facility, an educational and interpretive facility for the fishery and the Fraser River estuary. Our group, the group I represent, the Pacific Coast Cannery Society, campaigned to the federal government for four years to save this building that they no longer wanted to use. We campaigned for four years and they told us no, no, no. They've been doing that for four years.

I have a letter here from Mr. David Anderson, who tells me that unfortunately they had no choice but to take the building down. We found out from his office that they did not know the building was being demolished.

• 2425

I also have, in the same letter, a remark from Mr. Anderson that I should volunteer my time with the Gulf of Georgia Cannery, which is a worthwhile facility, yes. However, I do not feel a federal minister has the right to tell me in print where I should volunteer my time.

Lack of cooperation point two concerns DFO again. Behind you sits the Steveston town site, and just beyond that is an island known as Steveston Island, otherwise known to the locals as “Shady”. This is a very environmentally sensitive island. It's home to numerous birds and wildfowl as well as fish, which inhabit it throughout the year. It's an island that sits directly on the path of what is known worldwide as the Pacific Flyway.

Another group I am representing here this evening, the Lower Fraser Estuary Stewardship Program, the environment arm of the Coastal Community Conservation Society, is doing a major environmental project over there by doing a habitat, plant life, and fish inventory, along with restoration of two of the marshes on the south side of the island. Before we could even get to work on that island, we had to have a permit, a licence, from DFO. We got money from both the Action 21 program and the urban salmon habitat program of the B.C. government. We got money to undertake this project.

Once we got money, we then sought that licence, and we waited; and we waited and we waited. Finally we got a licence to do three small things on that island. One of them was to remove some of the driftwood on that island, and only in a certain location. As for the rest of our agenda, the rest of what we wanted to do, the rest of what we received funding for in our proposal, we were told we couldn't do it.

We waited and we waited for that licence to be enlarged. Finally, after many, many months of waiting and our timetable being put on hold, we were told, okay, here is your licence; you can go and do this.

Lack of cooperation point three—and I go back to the building here. I went to the provincial Minister of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food and I asked him for his help. I told him the whole story of the building, from A through to Z. I told him we needed his help. He turned to me and he said, I don't have the money to buy federal buildings.

I was on the radio at this time and we were cut off at that point. If he were here, I would point out to him that the building was his in the first place, because it sat over a provincially owned water lot. That water lot was leased by the federal government, but anything on a lot owned by somebody else is theirs.

The other thing I would like to point out is that I tried to talk a lady, a friend of mine, into coming to speak today. She would not. Her name is Pat Westman. She is the wife of a fisherman out here who has been fishing all his life. I said, you should come; you should make your voice heard. She said no. She said Alcan is going to get it all in the year 2000, so what is the point.

I disagree with her. I think there is a point to be made here, and I think the point is to be made by people such as me, who are members of environmental groups and historical groups, people who want to get together, who want to cooperate together and work to save the fish everybody is talking about here today; to save the fish; to save what the first nations call “the gift of the people”. The first nations call it “the gift of the people”.

If we don't save this fish, there is not going to be any more left to give to the people. If we don't start now with the local initiatives, such as out here in the Lower Fraser, where we are trying to put forth a major adopt-an-area program so other environmental groups and interested parties will come together and work on this and bring it into a larger scope....

Several years ago, this lady I speak of was selling fish with her husband at the Steveston wharf and a group of kids were gathered around her boat, watching what was going on. She took her freshwater hose and put it into the water. All of a sudden salmon started coming up to go for the extra oxygen. These kids were absolutely amazed that these little fish were here. She started to tell them the story of the salmon, from the headwaters way up in the Rockies all the way through, thousands of miles away in the North Pacific Ocean. Then she started to tell them about how the salmon would come back.

I learned just last year that over a billion salmon will sit in this estuary. I also learned that only 4 million will return to go upstream. I think the figures should be changed, and I think the local initiative is where we should start.

If we don't start here and we don't start now and we don't cooperate, whether it be on the provincial level, the federal level, or the local level, we're not going to get anywhere. All we are going to be doing is sitting on either side of the fence, and the fish are going to suffer.

That is the whole point we are talking about here. We're not talking about them. We're not talking about us. We're talking about fish. If we don't do something now, places like Steveston, which is in danger of losing itself within the next couple of days—you could look at it in that way—and places like the rest of these coastal communities, who will look upon what will happen to Steveston as being the blueprint for what may happen to them, will go by the wayside and will become extinct. We all know that extinction is forever.

• 2430

Thank you.

The Vice-Chairman (Mr. Gary Lunn): Thank you, Mr. Kibble.

I believe we have one more presenter, Mr. Kreutziger.

Is there anybody else who wishes to speak after him?

Mr. Robert Kreutziger (Individual Presentation): I have been a commercial fisherman for many years. I worked in the logging camps and all the other things that we do out here on the west coast. I am a transplanted prairie-ite.

I am fortunate. Being last, maybe I will be recognized on some of the comments, because I didn't get all the answers today. That is why I was stubborn enough to stay here.

There are some people, like Mr. Duncan here, who used to be in Salmon River. Those are the people who should be respected. When the John Duncans are multiplied by the thousands of other people on this coast and the thousands of rivers on this coast.... We find them in Boot Hill sooner, when it's supposed to be later. This is what it is all about.

What I am reading to you tonight is that nobody has shown any recognition of the loss of 766 rivers in British Columbia up to November 1, 1996, while only two have been lost in Alaska in the same timeframe.

We are accelerating. This is 1998. We started in the 1800s. What I am saying is that the rivers are actively getting lost along the way, through whatever we want to call it. It is mismanagement or an organized method of just getting rid of these rivers and these species.

These questions I want answered: why, and what are we doing about it?

I heard the union standing here and saying, economic opportunities. Yes, there are economic opportunities. All we need to do is have a vision.

One of the visions or one of the answers here is in a pamphlet put out by DFO. Adams River. The light isn't the best for my eyes, as I am getting a little bit older, but what it says is that 20% of the sockeye fry die of natural mortality and 75% die by predation.

Predation means cannibalism, whatever happens in the rearing grounds. Two out of 4,000 fry come back.

A person does not realize this predation until they see some of the books that I have seen. They are current.

We hear them talking about rivers—the Fraser River, Shuswap. Wonderful people, wonderful parts of our ecology. The Nass, the Skeena. We'll call it 20 strong producing, sockeye-rearing lakes and rivers on this coast.

Here we have Dolly Varden and trout. We could create another industry, and all we have to say.... I have the figures here from 1946 to 1982. It comes to $365 million.

We don't hesitate. We didn't hesitate until this year. In the salmon and herring roe industries we didn't hesitate in paying out $1.75 million annually for leases so that we could have the opportunity to go fishing, while those armchair fishermen held a licence. They extorted this money out of us; we had to pay for a job.

That is what we paid for a job, $175 million in one season. It probably didn't reach that height, but it has been over $100 million since inception. That's what the user fees for a fishery are, an opportunity to go working. And Ottawa didn't care. They never heard us in Ottawa.

• 0035

I'm talking about economic opportunity. Here, if we could get rid of some of this predation, this cannibalization of our species—75%—if we could create another industry and remove these predators from these lakes, and we could double our return, can you imagine? Can you imagine that instead of getting two back, we got four back?

You want to know how we can recover and recoup. We're sitting here thinking and scratching our heads, and I haven't heard anybody.... I've brought this up at the union convention, I've brought it up all over. Maybe I'm cuckoo. Tell me I'm cuckoo, and then we'll throw this paper away.

We have a lake sitting up there, Lake Kinbasket; it's at the top of the Columbia River. The Columbia River now has 200-and-some dams; there's a mica dam there. But at Valemount.... There is about a mile between Valemount, which is at the top end of the Thompson River...and it's called Canoe Flat. Why don't we tap into this? Why don't we create another sockeye river and lake?

I mentioned it to Jack Nichols the other day. Yes, but nobody has got around to doing it. We can put in Dr. Peter Larkin, who is now dead. He passed away last summer. He said, yes, Bob, we have enough food in our Pacific Ocean to feed 100 million fish. Yes, we can put another 30 million in there.

We're just like a bunch of steers. We keep trying and trying and nothing happens. Goddamn it, why can't we go and give it a whirl—either that or get the academics to see if there are feasible opportunities? We have the native people and the people up there who are landlocked.

I just read in yesterday's paper that we're going to try to do something with the darn kokanee. The kokanee is a derivative of the sockeye. Why don't we do some of those things?

I know it's getting late, but I have a few important questions. Has anybody ever seen the mandate of the DFO re the introduction of fish aquaculture, April 26...I think it was 1986? And what was the mandate? The mandate, to be very concise and short, said fish aquaculture wasn't going to be at the expense of wild salmon—simply that. They were going to be equal, but it wouldn't be one at the expense of the other.

Well, I was fortunate. I sat through 30 meetings and not a person paid me for a fish aquaculture review that the provincial government paid $1 million for. They underwrote $1 million to come up with nothing. I find better stuff in the garbage bag or in the toilet than what I got out of the fish aquaculture review.

We had a doctor by the name of Dr. Rosenthal from Europe, a renowned biologist or whatever. He said it took 25 years to kill off wild salmon in Europe, and that's a fact. The Bank of Norway went broke coming up with $700 million because of debt failure to the bank.

More recently—and I think some of you people must have read it—it said in the paper that Atlantic salmon have decreased since 1975 from 700,000 down to 200,000. That's only the Atlantic coast. You don't have enough time, and maybe none of you care, but I could tell you a horror story, amongst all the horror stories we heard today.

What are we going to do about that? I have to allude to what Jim Fulton said here tonight about disease. You haven't seen what is happening to the west coast of Vancouver Island and the native population.

On September 12, 1994, Simon Lucas, a wonderful chief from Hesquiat, was on the ferry with me and we had a conversation. He said he was taking home the casket of a 12-year-old little girl, but he said, in his way of speaking—and he's a wonderful man—that the casket was sealed because they didn't know what this little girl died from.

• 0040

Two springs ago, or around New Year's Day, I had a phone call from a friend. The friend said, do you know Bloedel's channel, which is across Chatham Point? Yes, I said, I do. He said, we have two black cod farms there, and do you know what we're feeding them? Morts—which is dead Atlantic salmon, died from diseases. And we are marketing them.

I sent a letter to Ms. Stancil, from the fisheries review. She got back to me: yes, Clare Backman, from Courtenay, the DFO officer, the fishery officer there, or the enhancement officer, yes, that is true. We have two vets, Dr. Craig Stephen and Mark Sheppard. They must have been passed this information. Anyhow, I got it back. The information was that yes, they were feeding those black cod dead morts. And not only do they pollute; this is what you're selling to the market. And on top of that, we're polluting the environment.

I hate to take your time, but I heard people talking about the coho fry. My goodness gracious sakes alive, we killed off the Jervis Inlet and that part of the world with fish farms, and now we're doing these goldarned fish farms from one bay to one river mouth to one creek, and what are they doing? There was a gentleman sitting here earlier who took a dive for me underneath a fish farm in Loughborough Inlet. And it has to be only in the spring, not when Greg D'Avignon says, in the fall, when the salmon and herring and all marine life is migrating. He found two inches of skeletons. The fish have already been digested, passed through the fish, and they've landed on the bottom, where there is no tide to flush this out.

That's where our fish is going. You people come here to find out what happened to it. As I said, I have a stack of books this high, and they aren't edited by me; they're edited by the fisheries, the farm fish review board. And they come up.... If you want to see what some of the streams are going to look like in a couple more years, we're going to have no wild salmon industry; it's going to be fish farms.

I'll just sum it up, because there's too much for me to say. Well, there is another story to say, but I'll say this about the fish farms: they're going to take this industry over. And there isn't one nutritional value in that. Don't believe all the BS. Let them prove that there is nutritional value in it. You have to kick the fish farmers and feed suppliers for the fish farmers out of Chile and Peru. They have a moratorium there. Now they say they're going to raise land-based feed. What is it going to be? Wheat chaff, sawdust immersed in soya oil—that's going to be the feed for the fish farm.

Go down to Moore-Clarke; that's B.C. Packers that owns Moore-Clarke. And worse than that, when we're talking about Charlie McKee and about what happened in Alaska, yes, it's $1 billion. Those people's backs are to the North Pole. They have to sign a waiver for those fish companies in order to get the milk or their feed, whatever food supplies or credit or whatever it is. They don't know any better. All they know is one person died today in Goodnews Bay up in Bristol Bay.

But that isn't the tragedy. The tragedy is what has gone on with this Ruckelshaus and Strangway deal, what has happened to the Nisga'a people in the border of Alaska and the Nass Valley, the interception by the American first nations and the American people. We haven't heard of one fish being caught in Alaska by the native people. They don't have to record them, report them, or anything like that. We never heard how many fish were caught by the first nations in Washington state.

I had phone calls.... There's a wonderful man who wasn't here today by the name of Frank Barton. We could have had Jacob Tate, or whatever his name is. He's president of the first nations. He could have alluded to what is going on up there.

0045

We don't even have anybody with observer status really to monitor how much fish the Alaska first nations caught, put on those trailers and sold and transferred through Canada to Washington state to be processed. Can you imagine? They are fishing how many days a week, right from Boston Rocks to outside of Noyes Island—people of dual citizenship from Washington state. Seine boats are fishing that fish. We haven't heard one question asked.

I've tried to go to the media. Charlie McKee and I tried to go to Glen Clark; and Glen Clark, as good a man as he is, is only as good as his observers are.

That leaves a lot of questions about who we are fighting for. Who is our enemy?

I've asked a lot of questions. Those are only a few. I hope you can tolerate them. I would like to have answers to them, because if anybody doesn't believe me, they can always check them themselves.

The Vice-Chairman (Mr. Gary Lunn): Thank you, Mr. Kreutziger.

Again, I'll just tell you there will be a report. It will take a few months. It will be available through your MP. It's a public document.

I appreciate everyone's patience and their comments. We have got a lot of valuable information.

Having said that, I see Mr. Baker is about ready to knock me on the head, so we'll close the meeting.

Thank you.

The meeting is adjourned.