Marine Protected Areas
Our Position
HEFA holds a position against the imposition of Marine Protected Areas (MPA’s). We believe that for an MPA to be successful it must have broad-based community support. The community must be consulted, involved, and remain part of the ongoing management of the MPA. However, before that can be achieved, the Department of Fisheries must be able to provide sound rational and clear explanations for the Marine Protected Area.
Marine Protected Areas can and will disrupt the local use of the waters encompassed by the MPA. Consequently the Department of fisheries must ground their recommendations in Science with attainable goals that can be used to quantitively measure the success of the MPA. Lacking this mechanism measurable goals there is not way to hold the Department of Fisheries accountable for their regulations.
We will assess MPA’s based on the following:
- What is being protected?
- Demonstrate that no other existing regulation can adequately protect it.
- What threats is it being protected from?
- How will the MPA protect from these threats?
- What are the expected outcomes?
- How will the outcomes be measured?
- What will happen if the outcomes are achieved or not achieved?
- Demonstrate that the MPA will not be economically detrimental to the fishing industry or the community at large.
The only way forward will be consultations promoting transparency and accountability.
Seals
The biggest threat to a future Blue Economy
The Seal Population
When the ground fish industry collapsed 30 years ago fishing came to an abrupt halt. A the same time the seal harvest had come under international scrutiny and was subsequently shut down.
Since that time, the seal population has flourished to numbers in excess of historic records. We do not have an accurate assessment so real numbers cannot be quoted.
During the same time, our ground fish species have continued to struggle or decline. Department of Fisheries Science has attributed some of the declines to the growing Seal population.
The amount of fish consumed by seals stands at unprecedented levels far beyond anything that the Maritime commercial fleet could land annually.
Subsequently, seals are the largest threat to a Blue economy!
Seal Management
The Department of Fisheries appears to not have a seal management plan in place. There is no annual harvest of any significance and moreover, there is no formal stock assessment to quantify a sustainable seal harvest.
The Solution
It is our positions that the DFO must quickly move to conduct formal seal stock assessments. These stock assessments must be used to define levels of seal harvest that control the seal population within a sustainable ecosystem whereby seals are not further contributing to the possible extinction of our ground fish species.
Simultaneously, the government of Canada should more to create a full use of seal product and supply chain. This would include seals use as food and nutraceuticals.
Together, industry and government can achieve this end through consultations that demonstrate transparency and accountability.
Conservation Review
Conservation initiatives, done properly, will support future generations of fishers. As an industry, we appear to have become complacent in accepting status quo with no critical thought of what can be done differently or how we can improve on existing measures. Our conservations strategies must be assessed regularly against quantitative metrics used to measure the success or failure of those strategies. This appears to not be happening in some cases, if any. One such failure is out V-notch program used in a variety of LFA’s.
The path forward must include broad-based consultations using principles of transparency and accountability.
Ghost Gear
One global issue that HEFA is keen to address is the issue of Ghost Gear. Ghost gear is a problem world wide. Not only does it continue to kill a wide variety of fish species that come in contact it is also a major source of Ocean pollution including ocean plastics. HEFA intends to work with the Federal and Provincial government as well as industry to help offset and mitigate damages caused by Ghost Gear.
V-Notching
Our V-notch program has been in place for 2 decades. The biggest argument to keep the program is that it is what we have and the decision has been made. Frankly, that is a weak argument.
Since inception, there has been no independent study to quantify the effects of V-notching. The Department and fishing associations point to the thriving lobster stock. However, lobster stocks have thrives everywhere, regardless of management strategy. The logical assumption is that a broad scale impact has driven a broad scale increase in abundance. That driver has been warming oceans. There is numerouse studies to support that theory.
On the other hand, we know where V-notching has failed:
- It does not pass any risk assessment. It is unenforceable, it does not stand in court, and there is no measure of compliance or benefit via increase eggs per recruit.
- We have no science. We do not know how many V-notch lobsters survive notching. We do not know how many are caught and sold commercials. We do not know haw many are caught and take for personal consumption. Moreover, we have no controls of V-notch caught for ceremonial purposes.
Those are major flaws in this conservation strategy and when compared with different strategies in other lobster fishing areas we can state that this is a failed conservation strategy.