MPs flog DFO brass over alleged elver mismanagement

“You all appear so calm and we all appear so frustrated,” MP Ken Hardie told Canada’s top DFO brass on Tuesday afternoon in Ottawa.

Deputy minister Annette Gibbons, associate deputy minister Adam Burns, regional director general Doug Wentzell and Brent Napier, the director of enforcement policy and programs,  had been hauled before the standing committee on Fisheries and Oceans to answer to how they’d allowed the elver fishery to descend into rampant poaching and violence over the past six years and what they’re going to do to save it.

Their minister, Diane Lebouthillier, had refused to participate.

Hours before her subordinates were set to testify, she sent a letter to the holders of commercial licences for the juvenile American eels, saying she is planning to not open the season at all in 2024 due to concerns around violence and poaching.

Napier defended his enforcement strategy.

“The public sees some of enforcement action but it does not see all of it,” said Napier.

“There are elements both at the facilities, at the exit points and then the intelligence that’s being gathered as well. So there’s a whole continuum of not just the officers on the water but gathering intelligence, trying to understand where the fish are going, where elvers are going, which is important part of it, and then the deterrent impact which is stopping it along the way…”

Hardie, an MP for Fleetwood-Port Kells in British Columbia, wasn’t buying it.

“I’m sorry, but I don’t see or hear much about disruption,” responded Hardie.

“Disruption would be hauling someone off and taking the keys to their truck.”

The MPs grilled the brass on Chronicle Herald reporting from last week that showed while DFO received 1,550 reports of illegal elver fishing, only 60 people were charged and that the Public Prosecution Service of Canada hasn’t prosecuted a single one.

Internal DFO emails obtained through a freedom of information act request along with a transcript of a meeting in January between DFO staff and harvesters appear to show that the Public Prosecution Service of Canada has a policy of not prosecuting First Nations members even when charges are laid by DFO. The PPSC refused to acknowledge whether it had prosecuted anyone, regardless of rights status, claiming it doesn’t have a search field for that in its computer records.

Asked about the lack of prosecutions, Gibbons said: “As for the PPSC and the justice system, I think those are questions for Justice and PPSC.”

No one from either the Department of Justice or the Public Prosecution Service of Canada attended the hearing.

Those at the hearing heard that while multiple times the total allowable catch of 9,860 kilograms of juvenile eels was estimated to have been caught illegally and exported to China last year, none of those catches had been seized by the Canadian Border Services Agency.

And that the Canadian Food Inspection Agency was inspecting and certifying the poached elvers for export as food to China, where they are grown to adulthood in aquaculture facilities for the Japanese sushi market.

“Have you asked the CFIA to stop doing that?” asked South Shore-St. Margarets MP Rick Perkins.

Napier responded, “The elver that leaves is not going out under a seafood label, it’s going out outside of a seafood label as I understand it.”

He added that there aren’t regulations in place that would require anyone holding, transporting or exporting elvers to carry proof of where they were caught and the multiple hands they had gone through.

Known as “traceability,” Napier said that is something DFO is working on.

It’s also something that commercial elver licence holders have been advocating with DFO for for two years, found third-party contractors to monitor and offered to pay for, only to be rebuffed by DFO.

“The companies we were working with were the one in Maine that designed and implemented the traceabiity system there and another in British Columbia that has contracts with the federal government — these are reputable companies with track records to prove they could do the work and we were going to pay for it,” said Brian Giroux, spokesman for Shelburne Elver, after listening to the hearings.

“We would trace it from the point of catch to the market. We were ready to go with it this year. All we needed from DFO was access to their database and they said no.”

Annette Gibbons said DFO is working on new regulations that would include traceability and give DFO officers the legal power to seize and arrest individuals possessing elvers without proof they’d been caught legally.

But she wouldn’t offer a timeline for when they’d be coming.

“You’ve had nearly a 50 per cent increase in your staff, over a doubling of DFO’s budget since 2015, since this government got elected, what do you need to get the job done?” asked Newfoundland and Labrador MP Clifford Small.

“Is it possible that you can actually do the job?”

To which Gibbons responded, “So I would say, the regulatory progress is really the key determinant of the speed of which we go. There are steps that we follow when bringing in regulations and you know, it takes time, regulatory processes typically take more than two years.”

The eight commercial licence holders and three First Nations licence holders have been given 10 days to respond to Lebouthillier’s proposal to not open the elver fishery at all this year.

The fishery had a landed value of some $45 million in 2022 and employed over 200 people.

Both First Nations and commercial licence holders have been highly critical of Lebouthillier’s proposal.

“Clearly, DFO had no intentions of working in good faith with the Mi’kmaq on the elver fishery,” said Chief Gerald Toney, fisheries co-lead for the Assembly of Nova Scotia Mi’kmaw Chiefs, in a written statement on Tuesday.

“We provided them with a proposal that reflects our inherent rights as Mi’kmaq and included actions for promoting responsible resource management. Today’s announcement by Minister LeBouthillier shows a lack of accountability from her department, C&P, and their requirements to work with the Mi’kmaq to create solutions for the fishery to continue.”

For his part, Giroux said, “I don’t blame the fisheries officers. It’s a tough job but they just don’t have the legislative backup to charge against and  and even if they do charge, the public prosecution service doesn’t proceed. For DFO management to blame this chaos on anyone but themselves is outrageous.

“For seven years, they’ve been warned and warned and warned and they’ve done nothing. The incompetence of management is stunning. Now we, who have legally pursued the fishery without a single charge or citation for 25 years, are being punished.”