As our studious readers are well aware, once in a while we like to remove the dust cover, clean the gunk from the carburetor and fire up the old Navigator time machine.
For this trip, we won’t be heading back too far, just three decades or so and the destination, our nation’s capital, Ottawa — welcome back to 1994.
Many will probably remember 1994 as the year the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) between the U.S., Canada and Mexico came into effect. But it was also the start of Canada’s 35th Canadian Parliament, which was in session from January 17, 1994, until April 27, 1997.
The 35th Parliament was formed from the results of the October 25, 1993, federal election. Remember that one? Many would like to forget it.
The results of that federal election were unprecedented in the annals of Canadian political history. The Liberals, under Jean Chrétien, were victorious, winning 177 of the 295 Parliamentary seats. The Bloc Québécois emerged as the official opposition with 54 seats, while the Reform Party captured 52 seats and the NDP nine. This proved to be the darkest of days for the once powerful Progressive Conservative Party of Canada — winning a mere two seats.
Skip ahead to present day and could this 1993 election be a harbinger of things to come for the governing Liberals? Is it possible when the dust settles from the next federal election that today’s Liberals could be left with only two seats? Well, that is a rabbit hole journey left for another day.
So, what is the point of this casual stroll down political memory lane? Well, it was during this, albeit bizarre, 35th Parliament that the current Standing Committee on Fisheries and Oceans was established in 1994.
According to its official mandate, “the House of Commons Standing Committee on Fisheries and Oceans studies and reports on matters referred to it by the House of Commons, or on topics the Committee itself chooses to examine. It is a permanent committee established by the Standing Orders of the House of Commons (S.O. 104(2)(g)). Legislation, departmental activities and spending, and other matters related to the general subject matter of the Committee may be referred to it from time to time.”
Sounds important right?
Well, some might argue that it’s just a bunch of MPs (six Liberals, four Conservatives, one NDP and one Bloc) getting a monetary bonus to sit on a committee and talk about stuff, while presenting the façade that the government actually cares about the fishery in this country.
To the Committee’s defense, it has approached and studied some contentious issues in the past and made recommendations of how to deal with them. Such topics that the current 44th Parliamentary Committee has examined include seafood traceability, science at the Department of Fisheries and Oceans (DFO), mackerel fishing, right whales, pinnipeds (a softer, fuzzier names for seals) and foreign ownership and corporate concentration of fishing licences and quotas.
The Committee’s latest foray was into the scope and effects of illegal, unreported and unregulated fishing (IUU) on Canada’s fisheries resources and the degradation of those resources caused by IUU fishing. While IUU fishing is a major issue globally, some might argue that there are more pressing issues that this group could be spending taxpayers’ dollars on, but we will digress for now.
Since January 2022, the House of Commons Standing Committee on Fisheries and Oceans heard expert testimony, held meetings and received briefs from individuals and organizations related to IUU fishing — all leading to the release of its latest report entitled Reducing the Harms Caused to Canadian Fish Stocks by Illegal, Unreported and Unregulated Fishing.
To its credit, the Committee did take DFO to task when it concluded that “Management of Canada’s fisheries is ultimately the responsibility of the Government of Canada and the Minister of Fisheries, but successive Ministers have failed to provide the political will and resources needed to fully address IUU fishing in Canadian fisheries through adequate monitoring and enforcement. Stock management requires effective fisheries monitoring of all harvest and bycatch (waste) which can support the DFO’s estimations of what is removed from fisheries illegally which in turn can enable enforcement and prosecution of offences.”
The Committee went on to say that “DFO’s monitoring and enforcement capacities are limited by capability gaps while the government has increased commitments to fighting IUU overseas. Conservatives are not opposed to Canada contributing to the global fight against IUU, but do believe that we must ensure that the fight against IUU starts in our own waters. As the values of species have increased and illegal harvests have proliferated in some fisheries, penalties for fisheries offences have not kept pace, raising questions of whether penalties set years ago possess the deterrence required today.”
As it normally always does, the Committee did make some very sensible recommendations as part of its IUU fishing report. These included:
- That Fisheries and Oceans Canada take action to improve the enforcement of the Fisheries Act; ensuring the illegal poaching of species such as bluefin tuna, lobster, elvers, salmon, etc., is effectively deterred, which can help protect aquatic ecosystems and the people who legally
harvest them. - That Fisheries and Oceans Canada work with Indigenous and non-Indigenous harvesters and fisheries management organizations to optimize DFO’s collection of fish harvest data for all species in order to reduce the unknowns of unreported harvests and increase accuracy of DFO’s calculation of harvests and allocations.
- That Fisheries and Oceans Canada increase their dockside monitoring and enforcement efforts to more effectively combat illegal, unreported, and unregulated fishing and have an increased understanding of how much of each species is
being caught. - That the DFO assess its systems used for monitoring fisheries harvests with the purpose of defining how the systems need to change and be resourced to effectively monitor all harvests,
including bycatch. - That the DFO assess and implement changes to its monitoring systems to better detect and measure illegal harvests so that such data can inform and improve fisheries management decisions.
- That the Government of Canada work with the DFO to assess and where necessary increase penalties for fisheries offences to ensure penalties are significant enough to be adequate deterrence.
While this list contains worthwhile steps to improve the IUU fishing situation, there is nothing here that industry stakeholders did not already know. However, if this Committee had the power to put these recommendations into action, then that would be a different story. However, for now, such Parliamentary Committees will continue to churn out reports stating the obvious and successive governments will take the findings under advisement. Until the 45th Parliament…
