Evidence of meeting #12 for Fisheries and Oceans in the 40th Parliament, 3rd session. (The original version is on Parliament’s site, as are the minutes.) The winning word was farms.
A recording is available from Parliament.
Conservative
The Chair Conservative Rodney Weston
I call the meeting to order.
Committee members, we have with us today Mr. Pennell and Mr. Harvey, via video conference.
Before we begin, I'll go through a couple of housekeeping items. We generally allow about 10 minutes per guest if you want to make any opening comments or a presentation. There are time constraints placed on our members for questions and answers.
Are there any questions before we begin, gentlemen?
Dr. William Pennell Acting Director, Institute for Coastal Research, Vancouver Island University
Do you want some background on us first?
Conservative
The Chair Conservative Rodney Weston
Yes. You'll have 10 minutes to make an opening presentation, so you can provide background information within that timeframe.
Mr. Pennell, we'll go with you first. Then we'll move to Mr. Harvey for opening comments.
Acting Director, Institute for Coastal Research, Vancouver Island University
Thank you.
Good afternoon. I'll give you a little bit of background about myself and make a few comments that I think are relevant to this issue. I'll keep within the timeframe.
I have a doctorate from McGill University in biological oceanography. I've been teaching in fisheries and aquaculture for about 30 years ad retired from teaching about five or six years ago. I taught in Alert Bay and also in Nanaimo at Vancouver Island University.
My specialties include salmonid culture, salmonid biology, invertebrate biology, shellfish culture, and marine ecology. Regarding sea lice, I've had some field experience in the Broughtons and in the Gulf Islands over about three or four years. I was on the scientific advisory committee of the Pacific Salmon Forum, and I'm currently the director of the Institute for Coastal Research at Vancouver Island University and also a research associate at the Centre for Shellfish Research at VIU.
I want to make some disclaimers. I didn't have much time to prepare for this session--actually, just yesterday. There are some areas where I don't feel that I have expertise, so if there is any question you ask me on which I feel that I'm not up to speed with the literature, or that I feel is out of my area of expertise, I will certainly let you know.
The main point I want to make--and probably you've heard quite a few of these by now--is that a lot of money has been spent on the issue of sea lice, salmon farms, and wild salmon. I've guessed $20 million over the last decade; other people have suggested $30 million or more.
But a lot of this research was aimed at proving or disproving that salmon farms had an effect, via sea lice, on pink salmon populations. Consequently, a lot of the research did not address, in my view, critical areas of knowledge, which we need to resolve this issue.
For example, we really don't know how sea lice, in the infective stage, which is very rare in the plankton, find their host, the pink fry. We know they do, but we don't know how they do, and this is something you have to know, really, for any epidemiological study. It affects the models you would use to describe an infection and it could affect approaches to management.
We still have only a cursory understanding of how the ongoing sea lice infection on the high seas maintains itself. How that's transferred in areas without salmon farms, for example, to young fish, and their inshore and offshore life histories, we don't really know, despite many theories.
Another problem is that the sea lice we have in B.C.--and I know you've heard this before--are probably a different species. Genomics work indicates that they're different, and that stands to reason. Consequently, a lot of the information from research done in Europe over a longer time period can't be used with confidence. We don't know enough about the relative effect of temperature and salinity on our species of sea louse. We don't know enough about the precise interactions between the parasite and the host immune system, and that's very important.
We do know that Pacific salmon have a strong natural resistance to sea lice, and in other words, it's a well-adapted parasite here. But there are many other things we don't know because we're dealing with a new species, and we didn't realize this when this issue began.
Another aspect of the issue that I think you all are probably too well aware of is the rather intense polarization in British Columbia. Science works on debate, and that's fine, but the intensity of the debate here on this issue is very, very high.
It's greater than normal, in my view, and it's very persistent, so much so that we can find highly accomplished scientists on both sides of the issue saying opposite things and disagreeing strongly with each other. This makes it hard for the non-specialists to make a judgment when they are being told completely different things by highly qualified scientists. That's a serious problem.
Another issue that seems very important to me—although I don't know how many scientists would agree with this—is that despite all the research we do in the natural sciences, in biology and oceanography and so forth, it does not seem to solve the issue. We go from one issue to another, because the real question, I think, is whether we should have a salmon farming industry in B.C. at all. Some people feel we should, and some people feel we should not. This is the issue of the social acceptance of salmon farming.
Although all of these issues get expressed as issues of environmental concern and environmental impact, including issues of the negative effects on wild fish, I think the real issues may lie elsewhere, because we never seem to resolve them. No matter how much science we do, the argument is still healthy and alive.
I'd be happy to come back to this later, if you would like, but I think the social sciences may have as many answers for us as the natural sciences, and that's something we haven't really started to get to yet in British Columbia.
I have a couple of basic points to make. I think we were absolutely right to address the sea lice issue when it first arose about a decade ago, because it had already been an issue in Europe for some years.
But the issue here was a political one right from the start, when a large number of sea lice were seen on pink fry by local people in the province after the largest escapement of pink salmon in recorded history. They noticed sea lice on the fish, and then, a year later in 2002, in the return, the population had crashed.
The population went down from about 300 million fish to 50 million fish in one generation. That's an enormous crash. It's not unusual for pink salmon...but this was extreme. So it would be natural to look at sea lice, but sea lice were raised as the issue right off the bat by people living in that area of the province, and by people who had been trying to remove salmon farms from the area for some years.
There are a number of other quite legitimate reasons for the crash in the pink salmon population. For example, we could have too many fry for the food resource available. That's density-dependent mortality. It's a cornerstone of modern ecology and also of fisheries management. The food abundance and the timing of the emergence of the fry might have been out of whack. The fish might have been early or the food late in developing. That's a known phenomenon. Ocean conditions farther out at sea could have had an affect.
I'm not saying that these factors were in operation, but because pink salmon are known to undergo such extreme population variations and crashes throughout their range, long before salmon farms were invented and in places where there are no salmon farms, it would seem that we should have looked to at least some of these alternative hypotheses. Instead, we jumped on sea lice and stayed on sea lice, and these other possibilities have not really had a good examination. That's unfortunate.
The levels of sea lice have been reduced, both on the farms and on wild fry. Since 2005 that seems to have been a bit of a trend. We really can't tell whether this is due to some environmental change, like a lowering of salinity or a change in temperature, but one thing we do know is that the farms are either treated, fallowed, or harvested, or only have smolts before the pink fry come out.
This is an area management program that's been put together by the provincial government and the major salmon farms in the area, and I think it's fair to say that farm management has contained the risk associated with the farms and sea lice and wild fish. In other words, there is a management system now in place that should be able to manage this issue.
I want to mention sockeye, because I've noticed that there's been a lot of suggestion in the media that the declines in the Fraser River sockeye could be caused by sockeye smolts swimming past salmon farms on the Discovery Islands near Campbell River. A lot of the laboratory work done over the last two or three years has shown--while you have to be careful about transferring laboratory results to the field--that pink salmon, which begin at only about 0.2 grams or a fifth of a gram in size when they enter salt water, are vulnerable to sea lice until they get to be about 0.3 or 0.5 or half a gram. Then they develop resistance. By the time they're a gram, they're quite resistant to sea lice.
Sockeye spend an entire year in lakes, sometimes more, before they come to the ocean. They're quite big. They're smolts, not fry. They can be 3 grams or 5 grams in size, so perhaps 25 times larger than a pink fry. They have fully developed skin and scales and they should have a lot more resistance to sea lice, even if they did pick them up by going by a farm. So I think this is a non-issue, and that's a personal opinion.
The final thing I'd like to say is how not to do things. In British Columbia.... Well, let me just back up. It appears that the research done on salmon farms is often targeted at issues of concern to the public. That seems to make sense: you want to be solving issues that are seen to be of concern. We've seen waves of these issues, with sea lice being the most recent and also the longest lasting and probably most intense issue in recent years.
But public concern seems to originate from media coverage. So whoever gets to the media most effectively gets to set the research priorities. Essentially, if you have The Vancouver Sun directing research priorities, it's perhaps not the most ideal thing. In these situations, scientific work, as already noted, becomes polarized in searching for the smoking gun and so forth. There's a lot of time and money spent, wasted on casting blame and on trying to avoid blame, and this is why we did not know some of the key aspects of pink salmon biology and salmon louse biology, or sea lice biology.
If you factor in the time taken by managers and bureaucrats in dealing with this issue, I don't think we could ever really come up with a good estimate of how much the issue of sea lice has cost us—and we still don't know all that we need to know. Many less charismatic issues become neglected and money gets spent on something that has essentially been promoted by the media or people who have effectively reached the media.
So we need a new approach. I don't know what it is. I think some creative thinking needs to be done. Again, the social sciences may offer us some ways out.
That concludes my comments.
Dr. Brian Harvey As an Individual
I'm going to take an approach that is slightly different from Bill's.
Hi, Bill.
Acting Director, Institute for Coastal Research, Vancouver Island University
As an Individual
I think it's better for me to just describe who I am, how I got involved in sea lice, and what my expertise is. I've made the assumption that I am here to answer questions and to help when I can with information and, possibly, opinions.
As for who I am, I'm an independent biologist. I have worked independently since getting my Ph.D. in 1979 from the University of Victoria. My professional training is in fish physiology in fisheries and has concentrated on the sustainable use of aquatic biodiversity.
I have some familiarity with the biology and problems caused by sea lice because I performed two contracts for the BC Pacific Salmon Forum in 2008 and 2009. I was asked to review the relevant peer-reviewed scientific literature for research on the interactions between wild salmon and sea lice produced by the salmon farms in the Broughton Archipelago. That was my brief there. I am not a sea lice biologist. I don't have personal and professional experience in regard to doing experiments on sea lice. I did one more contract after that for the salmon forum on the threats to wild salmon in British Columbia, of which sea lice was one among many.
In the first decade of my career, I applied my training mostly to projects on aquatic biodiversity conservation in developing countries and indigenous communities. After about 10 years of that, I formed what I think was a successful--it's still going--Canadian NGO, a non-profit called the World Fisheries Trust, just to apply these research results and things I had done and published, both in Canada and in developing countries. We did a lot of training and community development kinds of things. Along the way, I published four technical books on the conservation of aquatic biological diversity.
In the third decade, I left the World Fisheries Trust to concentrate more on being an independent consultant and a writer. I specialized in two things. I wrote a number of reviews, risk assessments, and policy analyses on fisheries and aquaculture issues for some national and international agencies. Then, wearing my slightly more creative hat, I wrote and published a number of articles, columns, and books on fisheries science and development. These have been written for a general audience.
I published my first real book in 2008, which is called The End of the River . It is about global water management and fisheries and has a lot to do with water management in Brazil.
Some of the places where I've found funding over the years for my projects include the FAO of the United Nations, CIDA, IDRC, Fisheries and Oceans, the World Bank, the United Nations Environment Programme, the Convention on Biological Diversity, in Montreal, and a number of foundations.
I've written quite a lot of risk analyses and biological synopses for DFO. Most of these are on species that are coming under the purview of COSEWIC or are listed aquatic species at risk. A couple of those that were fairly high profile were the Cultus Lake sockeye and the Nooksack dace, which is an obscure little fish but has quite a political history.
I've been doing sustainable fisheries and biodiversity conservation in Canada, southeast Asia, and Latin America for about 25 years. At one point I led quite a long-term campaign for preserving salmon genetic diversity, so I'm quite familiar with many of the salmon problems in British Columbia.
I've organized and chaired numerous international conferences and workshops on aquatic biodiversity and advised the federal and provincial governments on some of these issues, as well as first nations. I've done quite a lot of work with first nations, including the Shuswap in British Columbia, the Nuu-chah-nulth, which is a collection of nations, the Musqueam, the Carrier-Sekani, and the Sliammon.
As for what I do now, I'm a consultant and a writer. In the consulting, I concentrate on these aquatic biodiversity and policy issues.
Conservative
Liberal
Lawrence MacAulay Liberal Cardigan, PE
Thank you very much, Dr. Pennell and Dr. Harvey. Welcome to both of you.
You have a lot of information, but we've heard a lot of conflicting information at this committee. We've heard Dr. Alexandra Morton. We've heard people from the veterinary side in the provincial department.
I think you're aware of what Dr. Morton would tell us, and your provincial veterinarians told us that the sea lice do come from the wild salmon in the sea, not from the fish farms. How would both of you respond to that statement that sea lice come not from the fish farms but from the wild stock?
Dr. Pennell.
Acting Director, Institute for Coastal Research, Vancouver Island University
I don't think we know. Before this issue became so prominent, sea lice on the farms were probably quite a lot more numerous than they are today, with the integrated treatment system we have. I don't think we have any way of knowing exactly where the sea lice are coming from. They've infected the pink salmon.
There are a whole lot of questions that remain unresolved. I'm not casting doubt that they could have come from salmon farms; it's perfectly logical to say that they did or that some proportion of them did. But we don't know about other reservoir populations. We don't know about the winter infection, for example. It seems to begin in December, when most of the wild fish have already come in.
There are a host of issues and questions that aren't resolved. If I'm correct in thinking that the salmon farms now have a good management approach, which means that the sea lice on the salmon farms are very reduced at the time when the young wild fish come out, then I would say we have solved the problem in a practical way, although we still don't understand the dynamics of the situation, with or without farms.
Liberal
Lawrence MacAulay Liberal Cardigan, PE
Dr. Harvey, would that basically be your opinion also? Are you more or less indicating that we've spent $30 million on this issue and have learned little or nothing?
Liberal
Lawrence MacAulay Liberal Cardigan, PE
Yes. I guess it should be for Dr. Pennell, but both of you can answer, because the fact is hat we've heard a lot of conflicting information here.
And in listening to your statements, Dr. Pennell's for sure, the fact is that we know very little about the problem. That's what we're hearing. We spent a lot of money, but we know very little about what causes the sea lice. Are they resistant to SLICE? Are they not resistant to SLICE? Is that the way it should be treated? Is it the farms or does this come from the wild source? This is a big issue at the moment, I would think, on the west coast.
Acting Director, Institute for Coastal Research, Vancouver Island University
If I could qualify just one thing I said, we spent a lot of money and we have learned a lot; I just believe that there are quite a few things we haven't learned, which we might know if we had gone about things a little differently. I don't mean to say we haven't dealt with it.
Liberal
Lawrence MacAulay Liberal Cardigan, PE
What I would like you to do is suggest, then, what we should do. That's what this committee would like to know: what we should do.
We understand that it's a serious problem. Are salmon in a drastic state of decline? Are they in a serious situation? Are they threatened? What measures should we take? What should this committee suggest to the government on what should be done? That's what we want to know. We're sitting here, listening to experts, and I'm sure you're telling us the best you know, but it would seem to me that people are telling us two different stories.
What should we do? What would you do if you were suggesting to the government what to do in order to do something for the major decline? Or can it be attributed to the sea lice at all?
As an Individual
It looks like someone is waiting for me to comment on that, so I will.
Again, the way I look at it is slightly different, because I was basically pulled in to look at the published scientific evidence for a link between the farms and the sea lice that were appearing on the pink salmon stock.
Liberal
Lawrence MacAulay Liberal Cardigan, PE
Can I stop you for a second, Doctor? Is that the study you did between 2008 and 2009?
As an Individual
Yes. I did two of them. One was a follow-up. The 2009 one was just an updating of the 2008 one.
Liberal
Lawrence MacAulay Liberal Cardigan, PE
Okay. That's what I would be interested in: what you really did find when you evaluated the scientific material.
As an Individual
Well, there was one major question asked: are the sea lice from salmon farms causing the decline of pink salmon populations in the Broughton Archipelago? That was the real question.
Questions such as where did the sea lice come from, and so on, are extraordinarily difficult technical questions of field biology, and i hasn't proceeded to the point where there is a smoking gun, but it's an extremely good hypothesis that is being tested: that they're amplified on the salmon farms and they're infecting the baby pink salmon. That's a very good hypothesis and there's a lot of evidence that this has happened.
But what I concluded...and this is going back to 2008; I'm not familiar with the last year of research on this. But I concluded that there was enough scientific argument--ad a lot of it pretty vehement argument--about whether the farm-produced sea lice were causing the decline of the salmon stocks. There was a great deal of disagreement about that, which is a healthy thing in science. That's the way science works: people disagree and eventually come to consensus. On that one question, my conclusion was that there wasn't consensus.
But there was another half to what I said, which kind of got missed, and that is that we have this thing called the precautionary principle, which is something that was put forward by the FAO over 10 years ago. There is a precautionary principle in fisheries and in aquaculture. As for what that states, I mean, it's like wearing a seat belt when you know there may be a risk that you're going to have a head-on collision. If you're not really sure, you still wear your seat belt. That's all the precautionary principle says, but it's very difficult for communities and government to grasp and to know when to apply this principle.
Certainly there appears to be an excellent case for applying the precautionary principle in terms of sea lice from salmon farms. That already seems to be happening, as Bill Pennell pointed out, with a lot more management attention to the farms. That may be why there are fewer lice and why there have been fewer and fewer lice as the years go on, since 2005. That may be the reason. I think we are starting to apply the precautionary principle, and we should continue to apply it.
Liberal
Lawrence MacAulay Liberal Cardigan, PE
What I would take from your statement, then, is that there's also fair ground to evaluate that it could be just the cycle itself and not the farms.
We have heard here at this committee that the fish farms were not where they should be. They were out on the point of land where the wild fish pass on the migratory path, and they could be inland further and affect the wild stock less. In your opinion, is that valid criticism? Or is it not?
As an Individual
I don't actually have an opinion, but what I do have is my reading of the experts through their published research. I believe they still disagree on this issue, and that's all I'm going to say. I'm not a sea lice researcher, so I should not have an opinion on it, but the experts do not agree.
Liberal
Lawrence MacAulay Liberal Cardigan, PE
Dr. Pennell, do you have an opinion on that?
Before you make a statement, you do realize that DFO has indicated that they do not have any information to indicate that sea lice are a problem.
Acting Director, Institute for Coastal Research, Vancouver Island University
I agree with what Brian just said.
To go back to your question on what we should do, I think we should pay very close attention to this management approach to make sure that it's effective and that the farms are actually reducing the number of sea lice and sea lice larvae being produced on the farms. If we're satisfied that this is being done, then, as Brian says, we are operating on the precautionary approach.
We should also keep an eye on what's going on in all these areas where there have been sea lice before on farms and where there are wild salmon migrating through. That means surveys. That means creating an ongoing study. That's my opinion. And then, I think, it would be nice if there were money to keep work going on some of the fundamental biological questions that still remain unresolved about sea lice.
If I could add one more thing, I think the work on oceanography and how the ocean circulation works in that area should be continued and moved to other areas, because that's going to be vital legacy research for future issues that might come up.