Madam Chair, co-chairs, and members, thank you for this opportunity to present and for turning your attention to the application of the act to the first GM food animal in the world to receive approval for human consumption.
At the end of my presentation, I will also briefly address a couple of other CEPA-related issues.
I am the policy director at the Ecology Action Centre, which is a Nova Scotia-based environmental organization founded in 1971. We endeavour to ground our work in science, and we also try to find solutions that integrate the economy and the environment. Our preference is to be solutions-based, and I will endeavour to take that approach today.
I am not a CEPA scholar, and CEPA is not an easy act, or at least part 6 is not. There are others, such as my co-presenters Dr. David Boyd or Dr. Meinhard Doelle at Dalhousie University, or some of the lawyers at Ecojustice, who are better equipped to craft amendments to the act that will address some of the problems that I will discuss today.
Prior to EAC's engagement on GM salmon in 2014, we did relatively little work on the interactions of genetically modified organisms with natural systems. We became involved because of a threat in our backyard to wild Atlantic salmon.
AquaBounty is an international company with a research facility in Prince Edward Island. The company has developed a salmon that contains the genetic material from two other species: chinook salmon and ocean pout, which is an eel-like marine fish. The company claims that the fish can grow faster than conventionally farmed salmon. They also claim they have established barriers to their reproducing with wild salmon, principally through the use of land-based facilities and triploid induction, which is the creation of organisms with three chromosomes, effectively making them infertile.
We are concerned about the risk to wild salmon should GM salmon escape. First, GM salmon could outcompete wild salmon for the resources of food, habitat, or mates. Second, and more importantly, fertile GM salmon could breed with wild salmon, changing the genetic makeup of wild salmon forever. This would have unknown ecological consequences and economic consequences for recreational and food fisheries in Atlantic Canada.
We do have concerns about the research facility in P.E.I., but our main concern is with commercialization. At that point, you are talking about hundreds of millions of fish being grown in numerous facilities, and potentially close to some of our famous salmon rivers in New Brunswick, Quebec, Nova Scotia, and Newfoundland.
At the commercial scale, the barriers to reproduction with wild fish are subject to the laws of probability. Research papers have documented the escape of non-GM fish from land-based hatcheries in Atlantic Canada. We also know that triploid induction is not 100% effective. When you are talking about hundreds of millions of fish, a 1%, or 3%, or 5% failure rate is a lot of fish.
We are not looking for problems or windmills to tilt at. Atlantic salmon has enough problems without us inventing more for them. It's an endangered species, and there are probably fewer than 700,000 fish left in Atlantic Canada.
This approval has implications beyond salmon. The approval issued by Environment Canada is precedent-setting. It's the first commercial production of a GM food animal in Canada and the world. The biotech industry knows this. What Canada decides, what you decide, will have implications for the many other species with wild counterparts that are candidates for genetic engineering.
For these reasons, in 2014 we challenged Environment Canada's and Health Canada's approval in Federal Court. In 2015, the court ruled against us, and we appealed to the Federal Court of Appeal. We just heard this week that we lost our appeal. The court's main reason was deference to ministerial discretion.
Our principal argument in court was that Environment Canada gave approval for commercial production without assessing it. The Department of Fisheries and Oceans conducted a scientific assessment of AquaBounty's request to export 100,000 eggs to Panama for commercial grow-out and declared this transaction non-CEPA toxic, but made it clear that their conclusions were specific to this request. Export of eggs from one research facility is a very different matter than the production of millions of fish at numerous facilities.
We also raised concerns around the issuance of waivers and the long delays in the publications of waivers, which I can address if you have questions.
During this process we were stunned to realize that CEPA, at least in this case, provided no opportunity for public consultation, nor has there been any consultation with stakeholders, be it the agriculture industry, the commercial fishing industry, the tourism and recreational fishery, or even the provinces. The Province of Nova Scotia has publicly opposed GM salmon, saying it's not necessary to the development of the industry. There has been no consultation with first nations and indigenous peoples. Atlantic salmon was and is a very important species for first nations in Ontario, Quebec, and Atlantic Canada. Altering the genome of this fish should trigger consultations.
Based on our experience over the last couple of years, we have some recommendations. They centre around public consultation, the transferability of the right to introduce a new substance from one company to another, and the issue of caution and the precautionary approach. I certainly agree with Dr. Boyd that while it's in the act, the act is certainly not being applied like that, at least with respect to GM salmon.
We also would like to see included in the act an expansion of what is considered to go toward sustainability benefit, including a broader definition of risk.
I mentioned that we work on other issues that have implications for CEPA, and I'll briefly address those.
We also work on the regulation of the conventional aquaculture industry. We are concerned about the Aquaculture Activities Regulations, which came into force in August 2015 but were an initiative of the previous government and, in our opinion, were part of the lost protections expressed through regulatory changes. Specifically, we would like the government to look closely to see if the disposal-at-sea provisions of CEPA are effectively violated by pesticide use in the aquaculture industry, and the reporting requirements under the AARs.
We are also concerned that these regulatory changes are counter to the intent of the London convention. The cuts to toxicology research on this issue will also impact science-based decision-making, and we know that the AAR changes were in direct response to the charges against Cooke Aquaculture for using an illegal pesticide in New Brunswick.
Finally, environmental justice, raised by David Boyd and other presenters, is important for our organization, and we work with impact to communities. We appreciate that the committee is considering this dimension in its review and that some presenters have raised it, and while we haven't focused on CEPA in our work on environmental justice, we are happy to answer questions on that matter.
Thank you very much.