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Results: 1 - 15 of 69
View Robert Morrissey Profile
Lib. (PE)
View Robert Morrissey Profile
2021-06-02 17:38
Thank you, Chair.
I'll begin by thanking and congratulating the minister for ensuring that DFO got a significant budget increase in this budget. That is no simple feat and, Minister, I want to acknowledge your work on that.
Minister, the lobster and crab fishery has been very beneficial for commercial and first nation fishers in Atlantic Canada, and I have always focused on policies that protect the value and future of these important fisheries. My concern today, and my question to you, stems from testimony that was given in the fisheries committee and directly from fishers about the growing practice of unrecorded sales for cash in the lobster and crab fisheries. These sales are used to influence who gets the product. This practice will hurt the industry, as it has a destabilizing effect on the fishery.
What enforcement measures are in place and what steps is your department taking to identify this practice, document it, prosecute where necessary and eliminate it, Madam Minister?
View Bernadette Jordan Profile
Lib. (NS)
Thank you for the question, Mr. Morrissey.
One of the things that we all hear about is the unreported sales of fish. This is a challenge. Of course, as you know, DFO regulates the fishery, but once it hits the wharf, it becomes provincial jurisdiction with regard to processing and to who's buying it.
I will say that we are working collaboratively with the province on this issue. Also, of course, RCMP officers have a number of different tools that they use to address the concerns and do investigative work. We do not direct them. They are independent.
I think it's also important to note that I will be meeting with my eastern fisheries ministers very shortly, in the coming weeks, and this will br a topic of discussion, because it is a concern. When people are selling outside of the boundaries of the law, it impacts all of us. It impacts the price; it impacts the data we have, and it impacts our exports, so we want to make sure that this is done in an above board fashion.
View Caroline Desbiens Profile
BQ (QC)
Thank you, Mr. Chair.
I would love to be a permanent member of this committee. Our very interesting discussions make me hungry for more.
I'll address Mr. Sullivan.
We've been thinking a lot and I've been taking notes. Transparency, community economy and market economy are important. The market economy is a resource and we need to maintain the market.
What are your proposals?
Could we set up an oversight committee that some of you could serve on? Could that be a way to brainstorm and monitor the situation more closely?
Keith Sullivan
View Keith Sullivan Profile
Keith Sullivan
2021-05-31 16:39
The short answer is yes. I think it's just a matter of some more resources here, and it's not....
The inshore fishery can operate very well on its own. It's a very healthy environment. Young people can get in and pay a fair market value and get a fair return on investment. It's just that the proposition for fish companies to go in there and get access to the supply is a bit of a different value proposition, and that's all leaving.
We really need DFO to follow up on what they say they're going to do, the investigations. When they find these people who are in violation, sometimes there are significant licences and there can be penalties associated with this. With what we've seen in the past, when they were outside the regulation and basically in violation of the owner-operator and the fleet separation policy, they were given a chance to fix it. The policy was there because they wanted people to come into compliance.
That wasn't what it was supposed to be. In the past, DFO got very lenient and I think were very sympathetic to some of the larger companies, but now we need them to really dig in. There have to be consequences. I think that's the biggest thing that we see. If people are fined or lose access to licences that are worth millions of dollars, soon that will become too risky of a proposition for any company to take. Just make sure that we're doing what we can to keep those licences in generally the local areas, with the harvesters in those communities.
View Blaine Calkins Profile
CPC (AB)
You fail to make the point that you have an enforcement issue. I'm a former conservation officer. I'm a former national park warden. I understand fully the idea of leaving things marked so that they are easily accessible for law enforcement. You've told me that you've had a whopping two out of 41 cases, on average. If it's not a case of conservation concern—and it clearly is not, because size does not matter when it comes to prawns for conservation, as has already been admitted here—so there must be a reason for doing this that meets some type of conservation rationale or some other type of rationale for enforcement.
I've heard that it's a whopping two cases out of 41 charges that are laid on average every year. Then I've heard some startling things coming out of the mouths of some of the people here, saying that the regulatory changes were made to meet the needs of enforcement. I thought perhaps maybe we would just meet the needs of the fishermen to the best of our ability and let them carry on with their lives and their livelihoods.
I guess the question I have is this: Do the fishers refuse or remain non-compliant when they're asked to thaw a tub?
Rebecca Reid
View Rebecca Reid Profile
Rebecca Reid
2021-05-26 16:54
There have been no regulatory changes made. These regulations have been in place since 1993. When inspection of their product is requested, the fishermen are compliant. Nicole can speak to that more specifically.
This isn't a question about whether people are resisting the enforcement or the inspection. It's about how to produce the product in a way—
View Serge Cormier Profile
Lib. (NB)
Okay, so you mean that for only two size violations, you want to change fishing that was going on for many, many years in a matter of, I think, two months.
I'm not sure if you know this, but my father was a fisherman all his life. Changing the way you fish doesn't happen overnight. You need time to organize yourself. You need time to prepare your gear and everything. For example, here on the east coast we're fishing lobster. If there is a size violation, we fine those people and take some of them to court. We don't change the way we measure lobster the year afterward.
Why, if there were only two violations like that, do you want to change a process that's been going on for years? It seems there is no conservation issue whatsoever. Why are you changing the rules all of a sudden, giving the industry no time to prepare themselves? It would be like asking them to mow their lawn with a snow blower during the summer. It would take time to adapt, right?
Rebecca Reid
View Rebecca Reid Profile
Rebecca Reid
2021-05-26 16:59
If I can respond to that, the answer is that we're not asking for a change. What we've said is that this is the practice that's been in place, the expectation that's been in place all along, so we don't see a change. What's changed is the increased use of tubbing. That means we need to make sure we reflect on how to properly inspect those products. We're not asking for a change in fishing. We've come up with a protocol to allow for the use of tubbing. We continue to want to enforce the size limits as an important part of conservation. That hasn't changed. None of that has changed.
View Serge Cormier Profile
Lib. (NB)
You have inspected those prawns for many years. You still want to change the way that they use tubbing, if I may say so.
Rebecca Reid
View Rebecca Reid Profile
Rebecca Reid
2021-05-26 16:59
I would say that what Nicole said is that the use of tubbing was very uncommon and there are other ways that the prawns are kept either alive or frozen, such as finger packed and frozen, that are easily and readily available. Those are very easy to inspect. It's just the tubbing that's hard to inspect, because the prawns are hidden in the ice and you need to be able to thaw them. It's that part of it. If there's going to be an increase in prevalence because of the change in markets, then we need to make sure that practices and protocols allow us to inspect the product. That's really what we're interested in.
Rebecca Reid
View Rebecca Reid Profile
Rebecca Reid
2021-05-26 17:01
For next year we need to continue to work with industry on some of the issues that Neil raised. If tubbing is the preferred packaging, then let's talk about what that looks like and how we can come up with methodologies going forward to make sure that the fish are readily inspected and to determine what that looks like. There are going to be conversations with industry, and I'm sure we can find a solution.
Sonia Strobel
View Sonia Strobel Profile
Sonia Strobel
2021-05-26 17:31
Thank you so much for having me.
As you said, my name is Sonia Strobel. I'm the co-founder and CEO of Skipper Otto. We're Canada's first community-supported fishery and one of the first in the world. We're based on Coast Salish territory here in Vancouver, B.C.
I married into a fishing family 20 years ago. Honestly, I was horrified to witness the struggles of my father-in-law, Otto, and my husband Sean and other small-scale harvesters. They face risks and uncertainties that no one would tolerate in any other livelihood. At the end of the day, a lot of them just hope to break even. They're barely paying themselves minimum wage.
At the same time, Canadians can scarcely access domestic seafood. Canada exports 90% of its catch, and 80% of what Canadians can buy in restaurants and in retail shops is imported, often from shady sources that support environmental destruction and human rights abuses in unregulated international waters, yet demand for local producer-direct seafood continues to skyrocket.
We started Skipper Otto to help take some of the uncertainty out of fishing and to address Canadian food insecurity. Our membership model provides frozen seafood directly from fishing families to consumers across Canada. We do lots of other things to de-risk fishing, but since this is what's core to the issue today, that's where I'll focus my remarks.
Freezing seafood allows harvesters to hold on to their product and find their own fair markets rather than being forced to sell to live buyers and export markets that won't set a price until long after they've taken the product. Monopolization and collusion are commonplace in this industry. Right now, we're two weeks into the spot prawn season. Folks selling into the live markets have already delivered the bulk of this year's catch, but they still haven't been told a price, let alone been paid a penny.
Not only is allowing the freezing of seafood like spot prawns, at sea a social justice issue; it's also critical to improving other issues like food security, tackling climate change and addressing seafood fraud. Our model allows members to enjoy sustainable seafood year-round anywhere in the country. It's shipped using low-carbon methods, and each piece of seafood shows exactly who caught it, when, where and how.
This committee has heard testimony from many harvesters about the impact of selling frozen-at-sea spot prawn tails domestically compared to selling to live markets. Last year, that meant that harvesters who tailed, tubbed and froze their prawns at sea sold them for 300% more than they received from selling them to the live buyer.
Skipper Otto supports 34 fishing families, like Joel Collier here, throughout the B.C. coast, as well as in two remote communities in Nunavut. These families provide a year's worth of seafood directly to over 7,000 families across the country. You heard from many of them through our petitions on this topic.
Our members are passionate about supporting Canadian fishing families. They do that by buying fishermen-direct frozen seafood. This spot prawn issue hits them personally, and they're not going to let it drop.
In Canada, shrimp and prawns are by far the most consumed species of seafood. Globally, some five billion pounds of shrimp and prawns are produced each year. Where does most of that come from?
The global shrimp and prawn trade is the most notorious for environmental destruction and human rights abuses. Most of the frozen shrimp you can get in Canadian grocery stores is in some way connected to human trafficking, slavery and deforestation of mangroves in southeast Asia. How wonderful, then, that we have this incredibly clean, well-managed, ethically harvested product as an alternative for consumers in Canada to displace some of that dirty product.
However, this reinterpretation of the regulation about spot prawn tubbing undoes all of that. It takes from fishing families one of the most profitable fisheries they have in a industry that's desperately difficult to make money in. Once again it puts the control and profits back into the hands of big foreign-owned export companies. It takes a sustainable, clean and ethical product out of the hands of Canadians and makes more space for slave-caught shrimp on Canadian shelves. For what? The DFO has not provided a single plausible reason for this decision. Of course, we all support strong conservation measures, but it has not been demonstrated that this is in any way a conservation issue.
Of course, we all want to put an end to IUU fishing and harvesting, but placing the burden of that on all harvesters is unjust and irrational. If a small group of harvesters and processors are violating regulations, then C and P—conservation and protection—already has the tools in place to focus the enforcement of the regulations without upending the entire industry. Their job is to enforce regulations made by arms-length lawmakers, not to reinvent the laws to make enforcement easier.
Please help me to tell our 7,000 member families across the country that this is solved. They are all eagerly awaiting the update on this issue, not just for this year but for the future as well.
In conclusion, I submit the following recommendations: one, that you give certainty to harvesters that tailing, tubbing and freezing prawns at sea will remain legal; and two, that you ensure that our local prawn harvest is protected for Canadian harvesters and consumers, not for the benefit of foreign corporations and investors.
Ivan Askgaard
View Ivan Askgaard Profile
Ivan Askgaard
2021-05-26 17:42
Thank you, Mr. Chairman, and hello all committee members. I really appreciate being asked to speak today.
My name is Ivan Askgaard. I am a commercial fisherman. I have fished for 40 years for prawns. I own a prawn licence and operate a fishing vessel, and I also have a registered storage facility where we are licensed to freeze our prawn tails.
I served on the prawn sectoral committee in the eighties and the nineties, where we collaborated with DFO to implement larger mesh size, increase the minimum size, and implement many other measures to make the fishery more sustainable. I recall that the telson length measurement was established back then so that prawn tails frozen in seawater could become a viable product. I would have to say at this point that consultation back then was far more effective than what we're seeing today.
For years I was investing in technology to catch more fish. A number of years ago we hit a ceiling for what we could catch. We reached the conclusion that the way to survive was by adding value to the catch by improving its quality, its convenience for the consumer and its consistency. We have invested in Internet marketing, packaging, cold storage and distribution systems. I have to say that not all fishermen have reached the stage of advancement that we have. We're independent and we're forward-thinking.
I also have to say that we feel privileged to be able to harvest the common property fishery resource of Canadians. Canadians rely on us to provide them with food and access to something that they in fact own but trust us to harvest, and because licensed commercial fishermen rely on the goodwill of Canadians for access to the resource, we've made a point of making some of our catch available to the public over the last 30 or 40 years. It's not only tremendously satisfying; it's good business. There has come to be so little seafood available direct from the fishermen, even in our little coastal town of Powell River, that our customers routinely thank us profusely for making our product available to them. It's a strong market.
For the 2020 and 2021 prawn fishing seasons, the markets have endured another cyclical crash in the markets for frozen whole prawns for export to Japan and China, where 80% to 90% of our production is destined. The poor prices on this occasion have been blamed on COVID. An earlier witness mentioned extensive collusion in the industry among buyers, and I can reaffirm that fact. Fishermen received as little as $3 a pound for their smallest-sized product last year. Their medium prawns sold into the frozen seafood market at $3 a pound. That's less than the cost of production, I can tell you. This year looks to be the same. Fishermen are trying to make any kind of move they can to avoid financial ruin.
The market crash has promoted innovation by fishermen to adapt. We want to be able to have certainty and we want to be able to adapt. We're not looking for any kind of a financial handout, but we do want some certainty. We're trying to create higher-value markets by producing frozen prawn tails and selling directly to the public. I can say that this is a long-time practice and one that we have gone to when we've had poor markets in the past. When I first started fishing back in the eighties, there were people back then selling frozen prawn tails. That's how long this practice has gone on. It's not a recent practice.
This reinterpretation of the policy is not a conservation issue. It's solving a problem that doesn't exist. It's so unjust that my outrage is the reason I'm appearing here today. There have been no recent charges for fishermen for retaining undersized prawns. We've heard one of the earlier witnesses say that it was about two a year. I think there was some confusion there. There were two charges in 2019 to my knowledge, and there have been none in 2020 or 2021 for undersized prawns, although there have been many other charges laid in the fishery. I've spoken with a fisheries officer who says that retention of undersized prawn tails in tubs by commercial fishermen is the least of their concerns.
I can tell you from practical experience that identifying a fisherman who has retained undersized prawns is a relatively simple matter, all this talk of thawing tubs aside. The tried and true enforcement technique is for the rubber boat to arrive seemingly out of nowhere and an impromptu investigation occurs of the product that is retained on deck. Timed at the end of a haul of a string of traps, DFO can easily go through a large amount of product—about one-sixth or more of that vessel's daily catch—to get a clear assessment of what is being retained by the vessel.
Any amount—
View Dan Mazier Profile
CPC (MB)
Thank you, Mr. Chair.
Thank you to all the witnesses for coming out this afternoon.
Mr. Zeman, you mentioned in previous testimony the impact that poaching is having on Pacific salmon. You specifically mentioned the concern with illegal netting. Do you believe the federal government should invest in fisheries monitoring for illegal harvesting, and if so, what are some of the key investments that you would like to see in order to make a difference?
Jesse Zeman
View Jesse Zeman Profile
Jesse Zeman
2021-05-05 17:08
That's a great question, Mr. Mazier. Mr. Haskell actually referenced this as well.
Last summer we had the worst sockeye return in the Fraser River's history. We had 293,000 fish show up. We normally have 10 million. That's a 97% decline. It was so bad that the scientists in DFO recommended that we not run the test fishery.
With regard to those fish that were headed up towards Mr. Haskell, there was an illegal fishery on the mid-Fraser last year where over 10,000 of those fish were caught and killed. In that fishery as well, there were four steelhead from endangered interior Fraser steelhead that were caught and kept. We have not only one endangered run that's being imperilled; we have two. The number of Chilcotin fish this year will be 80 fish, so we potentially caught 5% of them in a matter of weeks in an illegal fishery. Tens of thousands of fish disappear on the Fraser every single year due to a lack of investment in enforcement. When we get down to stocks that have 50 or 80 or two fish, it's very easy to drive them to extinction.
The investment there is definitely in collaboration and education, and it's also in enforcement. Try as hard as they might, there are simply not enough folks in enforcement to do their job. I would say that supporting them and increasing enforcement on the river, and also building round table processes where everyone can see themselves in protecting fish would be highly valuable for the Fraser River.
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