More than 100 delegates meet to sort out Nunavik beluga quotas

KUUJJUARAAPIK—A three-day hearing began here today, Tuesday, Jan. 21, on how beluga can be sustainably hunted in the waters surrounding Nunavik.

It’s the first time the issue, which has created conflict between the Department of Fisheries and Oceans and hunters for many years, has received such a venue.

Nearly 100 people gathered at the community’s new hall to discuss management plans for the next three years, with the current plan expiring at the end of the month.

Representatives from across Nunavik will air concerns about an imposed quota and hear the federal government’s perspective on why that quota is put in place.

Tommy Palliser, the executive director of the Nunavik Marine Region Wildlife Board, encouraged all parties to the hearing to ask questions and voice their concerns to the Department of Fisheries and Oceans.

“They’re here to listen,” Palliser said on the evening of Jan. 20 at a pre-hearing meeting to sort out logistics for the following days.

Those concerns, he said, will be taken in by the board as it develops a new beluga management plan, to be submitted to Bernadette Jordan, minister of the Department of Fisheries and Oceans.

The hearing is jointly held between the Nunavik Marine Region Wildlife Board and the Eeyou Marine Region Wildlife Board, which both manage overlapping areas within these waters.

It was decided at the pre-hearing meeting that the first day’s agenda would include presentations from organizations such as Makivik Corp. and the Department of Fisheries and Oceans.

That evening, the harvesters’ organization representatives of the Regional and Local Nunavimmi Umajulirijiit Katujiqatigininga (RNUK and LNUK) will gather to coordinate their response to the day’s presentations, and then present their responses on day two.

The final day will hear elders and individual community members’ presentations, with all parties getting a chance to share final thoughts in the afternoon.

The hearing falls just before the current management system expires, on Jan. 31. This system was established in March 2017, allowing a catch of 198 eastern Hudson beluga—though some of that quota had been taken prior to its establishment, leaving 187 in total.

The focus of the hearing is the eastern Hudson Bay beluga, but there will be consideration of the western Hudson Bay and Ungava Bay beluga that also migrate through the Nunavik Marine Region. The James Bay beluga also factors in, being adjacent to the Eeyou region.

The stocks differ genetically and summer in different areas.

Under the previous management plan, catches of beluga that are not from the eastern Hudson stock still count towards the overall quota, but at a lesser rate. That’s because the plan was built around conserving the endangered eastern Hudson Bay population.

Currently, quotas for Nunavik communities are based upon the likelihood of their hunters taking an eastern Hudson beluga. In communities along this population’s common range, one beluga equals one from the allowable take.

Communities farther from their range have a lesser likelihood of catching eastern Hudson beluga, so their catch of one beluga will count for less than one of the overall take. The time of year is also factored into the likelihood of an eastern Hudson beluga being caught.

When the current system was established in 2017, a pilot project was also launched to track hunters’ abilities to differentiate between the different stocks of beluga, both through their appearance and their location at different times of the year.

When hunters catch a beluga, they can have a sample biopsied to determine its genetic link to one of the four stocks in the region. If their catch was not an eastern Hudson beluga, it did not count towards their allowable take.

The total allowable catch has long been a point of contention for Nunavimmiut who rely on beluga for sustenance. This November, protests were held at the seashore in Quaqtaq after the Department of Fisheries and Oceans closed hunting there for the season.

Jusipi Kulula, the Kativik Regional Government councillor for Quaqtaq, told Nunatsiaq News at the time that he too attended the protest. Beluga are an important source of food there, he said.

This August, at the NMRWB meeting in Kuujjuaq, the board heard from the RNUK and Makivik Corp. that there was reports of an “increasing level of dissatisfaction with and the fragility of the current management system,” the board said in its hearing announcement.

Subsequently, on Nov. 19, the Nunavik Beluga Working Group, made up of representatives from Makivik, RNUK, the NMRWB and the Department of Fisheries and Oceans, put together a list of four options for management, and the advantages and disadvantages of each.

Those four options are the following: maintain the current system; update the current system with new information gleaned from the pilot project; divide the marine region into separate management areas, each with its own allowable take; remove the total allowable take altogether.

Following this week’s hearing, the NMRWB, along with the EMRWB for the areas that are jointly managed, will submit a new management plan to the federal minister, Bernadette Jordan, who will then have 60 days to respond.