By Sonal Gupta, Local Journalism Initiative Reporter Canada's National Observer
Indigenous-federal partnerships are producing some of the strongest signs of fish stock recovery in Canada, but such collaborations are rare, shows a new fishery audit.
The audit highlighted a major gap -- also seen in another recent study -- about how Fisheries and Oceans Canada (DFO) draws on Indigenous knowledge: Nearly 87 per cent of its scientific documents included no meaningful Indigenous input. Only nine per cent involved Indigenous Peoples in the process and about three per cent showed Indigenous knowledge helped shape the research and put their knowledge on equal footing with Western science.
For Russ Jones, hereditary chief of the Haida Eagle moiety, his community's herring rebuilding plan is proof of what long-term Indigenous leadership and co-governance can achieve.
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But Jones, who served as a co-lead on the rebuilding plan, also recalls how hard-fought that progress can be.
Jones has been involved in herring monitoring since the 1990s. By the early 2000s, herring stocks in Haida Gwaii were declining sharply. Local fishers lost their livelihoods, and community-led conservation concerns were growing. After DFO attempted to reopen the depleted commercial fishery in 2014 and 2015, the Haida Nation took the federal government to court -- and won an injunction that stopped the opening. "The injunction was the game-changer," Jones said.
The rebuilding plan evolved into one of the most collaborative processes in the country. The process established benchmarks for safe reopening of the fishery, identified priority areas for stock recovery and created a management plan that accounted for both ecological health and community needs.
"It shows what you can do when you work together on common objectives," said Rebecca Schijns, a marine fishery scientist at Oceana Canada, which released the new audit tracking 200 marine stocks over nine years.
Yet, collaboration with Indigenous people and Indigenous systems remains the exception rather than the norm in Canada, Schjins said.
There is still a "massive gap" in how science and federal departmental processes incorporate Indigenous knowledge and support collaborative management decisions and plans, she said.
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"The current legislation and policy tools have flexibility, but they're not enabling Indigenous peoples to steward their lands and waters as they've done historically," Schijns said.
The audit shows Canada is making progress, but far too slowly, she said. One-third of critically depleted marine fish and invertebrate populations now have rebuilding plans -- up significantly from just 11 per cent in 2017 -- and 12 new plans were released this year alone.
But that momentum is undercut by the fact that only 30 of nearly 200 federal stocks are legally listed under the Fisheries Act's rebuilding rules, meaning most depleted or culturally important species still have no binding timelines or safeguards.
Stock health remains largely stagnant: roughly a third of populations are healthy, another third remain depleted or in the cautious zone and a third still lack enough information for DFO to even determine their status.
Jones said community fisheries in Haida Gwaii are only starting to take shape, with a small troll fishery and a limited halibut fishery introduced in the past couple of seasons. He said the changes are still modest -- offering far less access than many expected. "We're hoping that over time, that will change," he said.
The Heiltsuk Nation's crab management efforts on BC's central coast is another good example of the positive outcomes that occur when Indigenous decision-making is incorporated from the start, Jones said.
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The commercial fishery had depleted nearly every population of Dungeness crab within the territory, said William Housty, director of the Heiltsuk Integrated Resource Management Department in Bella Bella. As a result, access to crabs for food, social and ceremonial purposes became so limited that people could no longer obtain them.
In 2021, the Heiltsuk Nation along with the other First Nations collaboratively decided to close commercial and recreational Dungeness crab fisheries in 17 key areas along the central coast. "They're good models for the kind of things we should look at changing," Jones added.
Housty said that once they were able to sit down with DFO and go through the numbers and data, they started to make some progress on management issues. "To this very minute, we're still monitoring these areas and we're still closed, and they're monitoring whether or not these populations are bouncing back," he said.
But changing the status quo remains difficult, especially when people are used to doing things a certain way, Jones said. Managers and stakeholders often have a strong investment in existing practices, which creates an environment that is not conducive to change. "It doesn't set up a good environment for making changes, even changes that are necessary," he said.
The audit shows early inclusion of Indigenous perspectives on the East Coast is beginning to shape rebuilding efforts for species like Atlantic mackerel. But Schijns pointed out mechanisms comparable to those in BC are "largely absent on the East Coast" -- a gap she described as one of the country's major regional divides.
Canada has spent years and millions of dollars developing a regulatory framework but now needs to move faster on implementation and broaden who is at the table, Schijns said.
"We aren't celebrating a bunch of nice shiny pieces of paper. We don't want paper parks. We don't want paper rebuilding plans. We want change on the water and to see these plans actually breathe life into our oceans," she said.
Sonal Gupta / Local Journalism Initiative / Canada's National Observer.
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