Fisheries Committee on Feb. 27th, 2012

[The Chair, Conservative, Rodney Weston]

Thank you very much.

Mr. Hayes.

[Bryan Hayes, Conservative, Sault Ste. Marie, ON]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Welcome, Dr. Roth.

I would like to add my appreciation of the chair's ability.

[Voices]

Oh, oh!

[Bryan Hayes, Conservative, Sault Ste. Marie, ON]

I want to pick up, Dr. Roth, where Mr. Donnelly left off, in regard to your expertise in terms of sea lice. I'm very interested in your findings. You spoke about the development of “veterinary drugs, vaccines, and pesticides”. In your mind, are there remedies for controlling or eliminating sea lice that do not have a negative impact on other species? Also, is it possible to eliminate sea lice altogether?

[Dr. Myron Roth]

If I understand your question, the first part is whether there are products available to eliminate sea lice that have no impact. Is that correct?

[Bryan Hayes, Conservative, Sault Ste. Marie, ON]

It is whether there are products that have no impact on other species, such as lobster or any other species in the area.

[Dr. Myron Roth]

I think there are products available that, if used properly and according to the label instructions, would have no significant impact on non-target organisms.

Can the sea lice be eliminated completely? Probably they cannot. Sea lice come from a group of animals—parasitic copepods—that have been around for a long time, and there are many hundreds of different species. If you are farming fish in the ocean, I think that sea lice will always be around, but I think that sea lice could be managed.

As I said earlier, if you look at sea lice numbers on the west coast you see that the numbers are managed very well within the context of a farming activity. Treatments are minimal at best, and there's very little clinical damage to farm stock, if any. It's very rare that a veterinarian, for example, would treat fish because the fish are clinically impacted to the point that they need significant intervention. That would not be the case in other countries around the world, where people treat because if they didn't, serious harm would occur to the farm stock.

[Bryan Hayes, Conservative, Sault Ste. Marie, ON]

You mentioned that land-based recirculating systems potentially provide complete containment. I'd like to understand your word “potentially” and why it was used.

[Dr. Myron Roth]

I don't think any system is 100% fool-proof. When we talk about impacts to the environment, the land-based system is first of all going to be discharging effluent that will have nutrients in it. Unless those nutrients can be completely removed from the environment and it's not completely separate.... If you have a lot of nutrients coming out of a closed containment system and now it's going into the ground or going into the ocean, then in my view it's not 100% contained.

Also, it is possible for disease organisms to show up in closed containment systems. In fact, it is a bit of a conundrum, in that if you do get a problem it's very difficult to manage. There have been cases in the past in which closed containment systems have basically gone out of business because they didn't follow sufficient procedures to prevent the introduction of a pathogen. That being the case, the pathogen can get in and then obviously a pathogen can get out.

Having said that, I think that by and large a recirculating aquaculture system system would be a closed system, whereas an ocean-based system is not a closed system.

[Bryan Hayes, Conservative, Sault Ste. Marie, ON]

Thank you.

I want to understand a little more about the legislative framework and jurisdiction. You state that the province has no jurisdiction on waste discharge on federal land and that they follow a different regulatory path.

I'm trying to understand this regulatory path in terms of whether there's a consistent outcome. Is the province's regulatory path more restrictive than the federal government's regulatory path? Whose is better, or are they one and the same but a different path is followed based on a separate set of circumstances?

[Dr. Myron Roth]

When I say a different regulatory path, what I mean is that if the facility is on provincial land, through the provincial environmental management act that the province currently manages we can assess the situation and issue a discharge permit. If it's on federal land, such as a reserve, the province has no jurisdiction, and then it would default to the federal Fisheries Act. Because you're dealing with two different acts and two different levels of government, I consider that a different regulatory path. That's what I meant by that.

In the case of the project that I cited, they would not be able to get and we would not be able to issue a discharge permit for that facility, because it's on federal lands. They would have to go to Fisheries and Oceans to ask them to issue some sort of permit or make some sort of comment on their aquaculture licence.

[Bryan Hayes, Conservative, Sault Ste. Marie, ON]

Can you make some comments in terms of current federal regulations that you think should be changed? You suggested that things aren't perfect in the regulatory system. I'm curious what adjustments should be made to improve things.

[Dr. Myron Roth]

One of the issues is that the deleterious substance clause of the Fisheries Act is always going to be a bit of a tricky thing to manage. That's because just about anything—the water you're drinking right now—would be considered a deleterious substance if you poured it into the ocean. If I took a bowl of shrimp and put a bunch of water in that bowl, I'd kill the shrimp, because they are marine animals, and I would have changed the salinity of the water.

Concerning the deleterious substance clause, on the one hand we become concerned about deleterious substances because we're worried about truly nasty things, but then sometimes it is extended to things such as effluents from farms, for which you probably could have a standard for releasing that fluid, but until you have that standard, the deleterious substances clause says zero: you can't do it.

That's something that needs to be resolved, for sure.

[Bryan Hayes, Conservative, Sault Ste. Marie, ON]

I'm checking to see how much time I have left.

[The Chair, Conservative, Rodney Weston]

You have half a minute.

[Bryan Hayes, Conservative, Sault Ste. Marie, ON]

Is there one other example of something that should change in the federal legislation?

My next question would take you a half hour to answer.

[Dr. Myron Roth]

We have reviewed the legislation. There are probably many areas in which we could improve it. I have to say I wasn't really expecting the question at this time.

[Bryan Hayes, Conservative, Sault Ste. Marie, ON]

That's fair enough. My time has run out, but for future, this is obviously something I'm interested in, and I think we all are as a committee: what federal legislation should change down the road to make things better for aquaculture.

Thank you very much, Dr. Roth. I think we have to move on to the next questioner.

[Dr. Myron Roth]

Okay.

[The Chair, Conservative, Rodney Weston]

Thank you.

Mr. MacAulay.

[Lawrence MacAulay, Liberal, Cardigan, PE]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Welcome, Doctor. Your experience in the field is well welcomed here. We've heard a lot of different testimony, and I'd like you to continue on the path you're on.

Looking into it, do you think we need a new federal aquaculture act? It's the federal government on the west coast and the provincial government on the east coast. Should it not be one government that controls aquaculture? I'd like you to express your opinion on that.

[Dr. Myron Roth]

Thank you for that question, because what I was going to add towards the end there—because it's a very big question—is that I think an aquaculture act would be very good, and it would be very positive for the aquaculture industry in Canada to recognize aquaculture for what it is.

Trying to shoehorn aquaculture activities within the Fisheries Act creates a lot of difficulties. The classic one, of course, is that someone is farming fish, and they're doing it under the authority of a fishing licence under the Fisheries Act.

Having said that, I think that if we have an aquaculture act, to be truly effective it would require us to address issues within the Fisheries Act, such as what I was talking about before—the deleterious substance clause—so that the two pieces of legislation aren't conflicting with one another.

As for a regulatory agency, I think it's good to have consistency, but I also think the province has a role to play, as any provincial jurisdiction has.

[Lawrence MacAulay, Liberal, Cardigan, PE]

Thank you very much.

I'd also like you to comment on the chemical treatments used by these aquaculture sites. What effect do you see them having on the surrounding areas? You have touched on some of this, but we have heard some testimony that under the open-net concept everything is dead underneath the pen. We've heard a lot of different types of testimony. We have also heard that the pens are in the wrong place—where the fish, the salmon, migrate back and forth.

I'm thinking about the lice issue. I'd like you to comment on this. How big a problem is it? You have no doubt heard about the land being dead underneath the nets.

Also, we're talking about the open-net concept and closed containment, but we're talking about an awful lot of different dollars. We're quite a distance away from having land-based closed containment be economically feasible. I'd like you to comment on that too, if you have time.

Thank you.

[Dr. Myron Roth]

I'll do my best. You've asked a lot of questions there.

To characterize the ocean floor as being dead is probably inaccurate. I do think there are some localized impacts, but those impacts are probably short-lived, from most of the literature that I've seen. Slice, or emamectin benzoate, which is a compound of choice right now for treating sea lice, has been studied extensively for its impact on non-target organisms and its persistence in the environment.

Now, we can always use more information, but to the best of my knowledge, it's not really having a demonstrable impact on non-target organisms below pens or adjacent to pens. I do believe there's some information that's becoming available on the residue persistence of this compound in the sediments, and of course that will raise additional questions of what the biological relevance is of those residues. I can't really comment further because that's work that hasn't been published yet. Until it gets published, it's hard to know for sure.

I will just touch on pen location. Siting is a tricky thing, and in early days pens were sited in the wrong locations. Now we're getting a lot better at siting pens appropriately. I think we have to look at pen siting more in the context of what we're doing now.

Lastly, as far as the dollars go for closed containment, there are no doubts that closed containment is expensive. Most sites are going to come in at tens of millions of dollars to build. I was looking at some data the other day where the capital cost for one of the sites being developed that I'm aware of—and this is some of the information that I got at a meeting—was pegged at about $23 per kilogram just to build the site. So if you extrapolated that to the west coast, for example, where we grow about 80,000 metric tonnes, and if you were to say we have to move all the sites to closed containment, that means we'd have to come up with $2 billion just to build it.

It's very expensive. Right now the system is profitable, and it's profitable within a well-managed regime. I think there's a place for closed containment. I support closed containment, but I think it has to work alongside other modalities of farming fish.

[Lawrence MacAulay, Liberal, Cardigan, PE]

So if I understand you correctly, you feel that we need to invest in closed containment, if nothing else, to have the technology and to keep up with Chile and other places around the world. You know what's going on around the world, and I truly believe—and I ask you, I'm not telling you—that we need to do this to have the information, but there's quite a difference between the profitability of a closed containment and an open-net concept.