Fisheries committee  To backtrack slightly, again one of the issues that the panel was asked to address was to assess the degree to which Canada is fulfilling, or has been fulfilling, its national and international commitments to conserve marine biodiversity. The panel observed that other countries appeared to be making progress in areas where Canada appears not to have been making progress, and not just recently, but maybe for at least the last two decades.

Fisheries committee  Yes, thank you. With respect to open-net sea pens, as I indicated in my presentation, there have been a number of documented instances and cases of consequences particularly to local environments as a result of things such as the release of antifoulants, pesticides, vaccines, and other debris and waste that have collected on the bottom.

Fisheries committee  I certainly can. One of the things that the Royal Society expert panel was asked to do was to provide broadly based strategic recommendations resulting from the potential consequences of climate change, fisheries, and aquaculture on Canada's marine biodiversity. We had policy experts and legal experts as part of the panel, so this particular element was felt to fall within the purview of the panel's expertise.

Fisheries committee  I'll start, and then I'll pass it over to Dr. Fleming for an international perspective. ISA first appeared in Canadian waters in the mid-to-late nineties in New Brunswick and resulted in losses of enormous numbers of salmon. Many farmed salmon had to be destroyed. This disease is basically anemia—red blood cells are reduced in abundance, and oxygen can't get to various organs in the fish.

Fisheries committee  I would not recommend that open-net pen aquaculture be banned on Canada's coasts. I think the report meant to—and tries to—take a balanced perspective of the realized and potential environmental impacts of open-sea net pen aquaculture vis-à-vis the alternatives from a closed containment perspective.

Fisheries committee  Yes, I can. The Royal Society report basically doesn't comment on the specifics of a particular region or salmon population. It identifies documented and projected influences on wild populations—not just fish—in the environment, in general, resulting from open-sea net pen aquaculture.

Fisheries committee  Yes. With respect to the B.C. coast—not the Atlantic coast, which is a different situation because Atlantic salmon exist on the Atlantic coast—the report indicates that any direct spatial impacts are likely to be localized and restricted to the areas of open-sea net pens, primarily as a consequence of the effluents that are released from the net pens into the water directly affecting the water bottom in that area.

Fisheries committee  Given the current levels of Atlantic salmon abundance, I think that is a good thing. However, what the report attempts to do—and what I think those of us who work in this field try to do—is balance the overall benefits and costs of any particular action from an environmental, economic, and social perspective.

Fisheries committee  Thank you very much, Mr. Chair. Yes, indeed, I would like to introduce Professor Ian Fleming from Memorial University of Newfoundland. He has worked on interactions between farmed and wild Atlantic salmon since the late 1980s. He's also worked on Pacific salmon and so he brings expertise from Europe, as well as from eastern and western Canada.