Commissioner of the Environment and Sustainable Development Jerry DeMarco responds to a question during a news conference, Tuesday, November 7, 2023 in Ottawa. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Adrian Wyld
OTTAWA – The federal Fisheries Department’s failure to properly monitor the country’s commercial fishing industry could lead to overfishing, a new audit from Canada’s environment commissioner says.
Jerry DeMarco’s report, released Tuesday, says Fisheries and Oceans Canada lacks the ability to collect timely and dependable data on what and how much is being caught.
“Many important monitoring requirements that would improve the timeliness and dependability of fish-catch data remain absent or incomplete,” the report says.
Department officials could not immediately be reached for comment.
Without reliable catch data, the department won’t be able to set seasonal catch limits that will ensure a sustainable industry, DeMarco’s report says.
“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,” the commissioner said in a statement.
Northern cod were once the backbone of Newfoundland and Labrador’s 400-year-old fishing industry. But the population collapsed in the early 1990s because of overfishing, mismanagement and changing environmental conditions.
A fishing moratorium imposed in 1992, which was eventually extended to other groundfish stocks, wiped out more than 30,000 jobs, marking the largest mass layoff in Canadian history. Within a year, the entire $700-million enterprise – and way of life – was gone.
“It is important to monitor fisheries catch to avoid repeating mistakes of the past,” DeMarco’s report says.
“The collapse of the cod fishery had an impact that went far beyond environmental matters … creating social and cultural instability on Canada’s east coast.”
The ongoing problem, he says, is that the Fisheries Department has failed to deliver on most of the corrective measures it committed to seven years ago, when another audit called for changes to ensure sustainable management of the industry.
DeMarco’s audit says the department responded by creating a new fishery monitoring policy, but he says that policy has yet to be implemented. As of this year, none of Canada’s 156 federally managed commercial fish stocks has been assessed for adequate monitoring, the report says.
As well, the audit found that the department has been slow to modernize its information systems, even though it has spent about $31 million on integrating information across regions to provide access to catch data.
The implementation of this new system is now 10 years behind schedule and won’t be available to all regions until 2030, DeMarco’s report says. “As a result, the department still does not have a complete picture about the amount of fish harvested and their biological characteristics to make informed decisions.”
The department uses a variety of monitoring tools each fishing season, including fishing log books, electronic devices and data collected by third-party observers.
DeMarco is recommending Fisheries and Oceans Canada implement its fishery monitoring policy, speed up the rollout of its integrated information system and review its third-party observer programs to deal with compliance issues, including lack of disclosure of conflicts of interest.
As of 2021, about 72,000 Canadians were making their living directly from fishing and related activities, generating about $4.6 billion in revenue, the report says.
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Nov. 7, 2023.
– By Michael MacDonald in Halifax.
