Canada joins effort to clean up old fishing nets

OTTAWA — Canada has joined a global alliance trying to rid the world’s oceans of millions of tonnes of old fishing nets.

Canada is the 13th nation to join World Animal Protection’s Global Ghost Gear Initiative, an international alliance of nations, companies, and environment groups started in 2015 to go after one of the most significant contributors to the earth’s plastic problem.

“We’re saying this is a critical issue for us to address,” Fisheries Minister Jonathan Wilkinson said in an interview.

Wilkinson added Canada to the alliance in Halifax this week as the federal government played host to G7 environment, energy and fisheries ministers.

Fishing gear is a far bigger issue to the ocean garbage problem than plastic straws, water bottles and grocery bags, but often flies under the radar as governments and environment groups focus on singleuse plastics that will get more attention from businesses and consumers.

Measurements show fishing nets make up almost half the weight of the 80,000-tonne Great Pacific Garbage Patch, a soupy-mess of broken down bits of plastic floating in the Pacific Ocean between Hawaii and California. By size, the patch is bigger than the entire province of Quebec, and is the largest of five such plastic patches in the oceans around the world.

In addition to nets, ghost gear spotted in the patch includes crab pots, oyster spacers, ropes, eel traps, crates and baskets. Fishers sometimes purposely abandon the gear, but often it comes loose accidentally and floats away.

Josey Kitson, executive director of World Animal Protection Canada, says the lost gear is one of the biggest hazards for marine life. Research shows 136,000 seals, sea lions and small whales die each year after being tangled in abandoned fishing gear.

“It does what it’s meant to do which is fish,” Kitson said. “It continues to fish indiscriminately catching whales, dolphins, sea turtles, even other fish that it wasn’t meant to catch.”

The gear, mostly made of plastic, can float thousands of kilometres away and exist for hundreds of years.