Canada's DFO: Managed to Fail
Is Canada’s fisheries bureaucracy the biggest threat to fish and fishermen in B.C.?
ON A GREY AND DRIZZLY DAY in March, the Granville Island fish wharf is quiet. No customers handing over cash for frozen-at-sea salmon fillets, and only a couple of lunch eaters at the Go Fish food stand. Carte Blanche, Dane Chauvel’s 40-foot troller, is on the A-Float dock furthest from the fries and scallop burgers. Inside the cabin it’s warm, dry and messy with off-season clutter. On the floor and table there are boxes of “red gear” – troll flashers and hot-pink squid lures that Chauvel uses for salmon in the summer – and other oddments, including three seasons of the Discovery Channel’s Deadliest Catch series.
“You’ve never seen it?” asks Steve Johansen. “You’re kidding. It follows the king crab and opilio crab fishery in the Bering Sea. Really good footage.”
Chauvel and Johansen are partners in Organic Ocean, a small group of B.C. fishermen who sell “ocean-friendly and responsibly harvested” seafood: salmon, ling cod, halibut, albacore and spot prawns. Ocean-friendly in this case mostly means line-caught fish and trap-caught prawns. Neither fishery drags the ocean bottom as trawler nets do, and they have minimal bycatch. “With hook and line, and selective terminal net-fisheries, you can be very species specific,” says Chauvel. “It just depends on where you fish, when and what you use for bait.”
Chauvel, 50, is a second-generation fisherman. He started fishing for salmon as a high-school graduate in 1977, using the money to fund a BA in economics from UBC and an MBA from the University of Western Ontario. After balancing a career in technology and venture capital with part-time fishing excursions, he returned to fishing full time three years ago. “Now I’m raising two third-generation fishermen,” he says. “And I’ve taken an increasing interest in the issues facing fishing, including fishing politics.”
Every fishery – tuna, salmon and groundfish such as black cod and halibut – has its own complicated backstory: overfishing, bycatch and poaching; pollution, warming waters and erratic food sources; habitat destruction by everything from dragger trawls to gravel extraction and urban development. The unfortunate agency in charge of this fantastic array of variables, the one responsible for managing all aspects of saltwater and freshwater fish, is Fisheries and Oceans Canada – formerly known as the Department of Fisheries and Oceans, hence the abbreviation still in common usage: DFO.
The DFO is the federal government bureaucracy that presided over the collapse of Atlantic cod. Overharvesting by Canadian fleets ultimately cost taxpayers $3.9 billion in support to Newfoundland and Labrador for cod-licence buyouts, regional assistance and job retraining between 1992 – the year the cod population hit bottom and the fishery was closed – and 2007. There was no accountability for the decision to keep the fishery open, and no DFO managers lost their jobs as a result of the collapse.
Famed fisheries biologist Ransom Myers, who worked for the DFO in St. John’s, Newfoundland, for 13 years before defecting to a position at Dalhousie University, calls the agency’s inaction on Atlantic cod “a crime beyond imagination.”
There are few fishermen, in B.C. and elsewhere, who don’t have strong opinions about the DFO. “When you talk to people who understand the Ottawa political system, they say DFO is broken, and DFO has been broken for a long time,” says Chauvel. “And it certainly is our experience that DFO is very broken. It’s not working.”
THE DFO HAS EXISTED in some form since the British North America Act of 1867, which legislated federal control of Canadian ocean fisheries. Originally known as the Department of Marine and Fisheries, the agency has had about a dozen name changes in the past 142 years and countless internal restructurings. Currently, the DFO has 10,240 employees in its six branches from coast to coast. An annual budget of $1.7 billion funds marine and freshwater habitat protection, fisheries management, aquaculture promotion and research, and even the rescue and patrol duties of the Canadian Coast Guard.
The Pacific Region division – centred in Vancouver and covering B.C. and the Yukon – is the largest branch of the six, with an annual budget upwards of $250 million and a staff of 2,275. While $250 million doesn’t sound like a huge sum to oversee habitat conservation and fishing licences along 27,000 kilometres of coastline and 105 river systems, there are concerns as to how DFO funds are being allocated. In the Pacific Region alone, more than 450 employees are administrative staff with no field research or enforcement duties, while its Ottawa-based National Capital Region branch – a virtual “region” with no habitat to protect and no gumbooted field researchers – has 1,343 staff and an estimated budget of more than $100 million. The apparent impotency of the top-heavy DFO in managing habitat and fisheries has not gone unnoticed in foreign circles. The Economist, in a 2005 article, called the DFO “flaccid” for its handling of issues in the Pacific Region, adding, “With anarchy on the Fraser, stocks in peril and an unreformed fisheries department, British Columbia’s prized salmon fishery seems to be swimming towards the same fate [as Atlantic cod].”
Closer to home, a 2005 report by the David Suzuki Foundation tried to lay a golden thread through the labyrinth of the Pacific Region bureaucracy, pointing out systemic problems and possible solutions. The critique runs to 137 pages. The authors take the agency to task for poorly allocated budgets and underfunding of critical habitat and fisheries research – and for being a political lapdog that avoids enforcement in favour of self-regulation by industrial users of rivers and coastline.
The authors note that overlap between the B.C. government, Environment Canada, the DFO’s internal subdepartments and hybrid federal-regional agencies makes accountability and habitat conservation nearly impossible: “DFO is part of a universe of partially responsible government institutions. The conservation bureaucracy consists of multiple loosely co-ordinated agencies . . . lacking a way to come together to do the job.” Departments compete for resources and power, which provides a motive not to co-operate. The aquaculture branch keeps its research from the fisheries and habitat branches, and vice versa. When things flop, it’s easy to point fingers. “They can blame others,” the report continues, “and use problems to enhance their case for more resources.”
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