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.