Has there ever been a single Canadian industry that has been subjected to more studies, papers and analyses than the commercial fishery?
Perhaps fisheries regulators in the country subscribe to the theories of American George Pólya, known by many as the father of modern mathematical problem solving.
Pólya once said that “It is better to solve one problem five different ways, than to solve five problems one way.”
The problem with the modern-day fishery is that challenges and issues are always being analyzed — oftentimes from many different sources, but little or no concrete action is ever taken and problems are never solved, just kicked down the proverbial road awaiting the next research paper.
The latest such report was released on November 7 of this year by nonother than Canada’s Office of the Auditor General of Canada (AGC). This time Fisheries and Oceans Canada (DFO) was back on the hotseat, accused of being “unable to collect the dependable and timely information about fish catch that it needs to sustainably manage commercial marine fisheries and protect Canada’s fish stocks from overfishing.”
The report, penned by Commissioner of the Environment and Sustainable Development, Jerry DeMarco, was a follow-up to a 2016 probe of DFO by the Auditor General’s office.
Seven years ago, the AGC concluded that DFO had “identified the key elements it needed for fisheries management: Integrated fisheries management plans, scientific surveys, third-party fisheries observer programs, stock assessments and reference points for establishing stock health. However, the Department had not put these elements in place for all major stocks. We also concluded that Fisheries and Oceans Canada did not always apply these key planning elements to ensure management decisions for selected fisheries were focused on conservation and sustainable use.”
Skip ahead to 2023 and Demarco’s report found that DFO had created the Fishery Monitoring Policy but had yet to implement it and that the policy was not supported by action plans with dedicated resources. “Progress in modernizing information management systems has been very slow. While the department has spent about $31 million to move to a single system that integrates information across regions and provides ready access to catch data, it has delivered only the initial modules of this new system while extending the system’s timeline for delivery across regions by 10 years, from 2020 to 2030.”
The 2023 audit also found significant weaknesses in DFO’s monitoring and oversight practices. The department currently uses a variety of monitoring tools to get the data it needs for a fishing season, including logbooks, electronic devices and data collected by third party observers. However, the AGC audit found that the department’s oversight of the information it receives had not improved since it was flagged as being poor seven years ago. This means that the department does not know whether the information it receives is dependable or timely or whether the data meets its monitoring requirements.
The report went on to say that as of 2022, there were 156 federally-managed, key commercial marine fish stocks on Canada’s east and west coasts and in the Arctic. Unfortunately, none were being assessed to the full extent of Fisheries and Oceans Canada’s Fishery Monitoring Policy to determine whether the level of monitoring was adequate and DFO still could not ensure that catch data collected by third-party observers was dependable and timely.
“Without dependable and timely data on fish being caught, Fisheries and Oceans Canada does not know whether commercial stocks are being overfished. The collapse of the Atlantic cod population in the 1990s —with its far reaching economic and social impacts —has shown that it is far more expensive and difficult to recover depleted stocks than it is to keep them healthy in the first place,” DeMarco stated.
So, what is one of the obvious takeaways from this latest AGC report?
It shows that this follow-up report, as well as the countless others down through the years, have no problem in pointing out problems and deficiencies within the federal fisheries regulatory framework. But why are these issues not being dealt with, especially something as critical as annual catch data?
Suffice to say that the next obvious study to receive taxpayers’ dollars will be a deep dive into why reports such as this one from the AGC are never acted upon. Seems like a logical study, don’t you think?
Ironically enough, even before the ink was dry on DeMarco’s critique of DFO, Oceana Canada came out with its annual audit of Canada’s fisheries, providing another scathing rebuke of Minister Lebouthillier’s federal department in Ottawa.
In what Oceana called a “lack of consistent mismanagement and failure to rebuild depleted fish populations,” the conservation organization highlighted the following DFO shortcomings:
- The number of healthy stocks has declined, and the number of depleted stocks — both cautious and critical — has increased overall over the past seven years.
- Only six of 28 critically depleted stocks have a plan to bring the population back to healthy levels, and none of them comply with the amended Fisheries Act.
- DFO did not publish any rebuilding plans this year, despite the requirement to publish 13 by April 2024 and failed to prescribe an additional 62 stocks to the Fisheries Act, leaving most depleted stocks without strong recovery measures in place.
- DFO is yet to revise the suite of policies under the Sustainable Fisheries Framework to meaningfully include Indigenous Knowledge Systems in fisheries management.
There is an obvious theme running between these two critical November reports. But what, if anything, will come out of it? Has the near constant bombardment of DFO policy simply causing the Department to circle the wagons and internalize these critiques rather than act upon them, leading to this action paralysis?
Interested industry stakeholders will be taking notice to what affirmative action might be taken until the next inevitable report.
