Fisheries Committee on May 12th, 2010

[The Chair, Conservative, Rodney Weston]

I call this meeting to order.

Gentlemen, welcome to the Standing Committee on Fisheries and Oceans. We really appreciate your taking time out of your busy schedules to appear before the committee today to offer your views and to answer questions the committee members might have following a presentation from each of you.

I'll outline it a little bit here. We generally allow about 10 minutes for presentations to the committee. You'll hear a beeping noise in the background. It's a timer the clerk has. If you hear that beeping noise, I'd ask that you try to bring your comments to a conclusion. I generally try not to cut off our guests, but our committee members are well aware of the time constraints they work within, and they try to get in as many questions and answers as possible during that time. I'd ask that you try to adhere as closely as possible to the timer.

Your mikes are turned on automatically. There's no need to try to turn them on.

If there are no questions, I'd ask Mr. MacDonald to lead off with his opening comments. He will be followed by Mr. Dill.

Go ahead, Mr. Byrne, on a point of order.

[Gerry Byrne, Liberal, Humber—St. Barbe—Baie Verte, NL]

I would ask our leading witness from Wild Canadian Sablefish Ltd. to ensure that he understands that he's on this side of the table, and not, as a former chair of the Standing Committee on Fisheries and Oceans, on that side of the table.

[The Chair, Conservative, Rodney Weston]

I recognized Mr. MacDonald nodding his head as I was explaining the timer and the time constraints. I understand that he's fully aware.

[Gerry Byrne, Liberal, Humber—St. Barbe—Baie Verte, NL]

That said, I think it behooves us all to welcome a former colleague, a former member of this committee, and a former chair of this committee.

I welcome Mr. MacDonald, through you, Mr. Chair.

[Some hon. members]

Hear, hear!

[The Chair, Conservative, Rodney Weston]

That's a very good point.

Thank you for taking the time, Mr. MacDonald. It's nice to see a former parliamentarian here with us.

Mr. MacDonald, the floor is yours at this point in time. Would you like to begin with some opening comments?

[Ron MacDonald, President, Wild Canadian Sablefish Ltd.]

Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman and members of the committee. It is a real pleasure for me to be here to talk a little bit about my experience as president of Wild Canadian Sablefish and executive director of the Canadian Sablefish Association, and about the issue that has seized the committee, which is aquaculture and aquaculture policy.

I will give you a brief overview so that you're all aware of why sablefish would be here. There are two finfish on the west coast of British Columbia that are farmed by aquaculture. One is salmon, which is much the subject of controversy and currently is the subject of a federal inquiry, and the other is sablefish.

Sablefish are often not really understood very well by consumers. They are also known as Alaskan black cod. In Canada we call them sablefish because, number one, it's the proper name, and number two, it helps denote the quality difference in the marketplace where we sell it.

There are about 47 licences in the fishery in British Columbia. The fishery has been operating for about 45 years. It was an experimental fishery initially. The Japanese had developed the fishery before the 200-mile economic limit; as a result of that, pretty much all of the market up until three years ago had been in Japan, so it's an export product primarily. People in Canada, even in Vancouver and Coquitlam, find it very difficult to find, except in five-star restaurants.

The fishery itself has over $350 million invested. We have over 300 people who are employed annually and we have a total allowable catch this year of 2,400 tons. Historically, it would be between 3,600 tons and 4,900 tons, but we've taken substantial cuts in our TAC over the last number of years out of concern for conservation. Indeed, we've been cited as one of the best-managed fisheries, not just in Canada but globally.

We were probably the first fishery, or maybe among the first one or two, that went into co-management agreements with the Department of Fisheries and Oceans. That has been very successful for us. We are partners in the management of the stock.

We invest anywhere from $750,000 to $1.5 million a year in doing surveys so that we understand the stock as well as we can. We make sure that we only take what can be sustained, and we work both with departmental scientists and our own scientists on staff.

All of the catch comes from either longline or trap. The trap fishery takes most of the TAC, and we're pretty proud of how clean this fishery is. The Bowie Seamount is, I think, a marine protected area in British Columbia--I think it was the first one--and it took a lot of years for the negotiation to get everybody on side about what the management plan would be for it. We were pretty pleased when we had an environmental group such as the Suzuki foundation agree that the trap fishery was so clean that even in a marine park or protected area we could still have a limited fishery. We have very little bycatch on the trap fishery and very little on the longline fishery as well.

We have issues. We have issues with the MPAs. There's one under way for Haida Gwaii, Queen Charlotte Island. Having these processes under way lends a lot of uncertainty for fishermen about their future access. We're impacted by treaty settlements that are very active in British Columbia, because in many cases the treaty settlements also take fish.

We have issues with integration. I should mention that the ground fishery in British Columbia is the first fully integrated ground fishery in the world. Sablefish is one of the six fisheries that are fully integrated. It's not really an issue, but it gives us some management problems because we're now fully accountable and responsible for every fish that's taken, so if we catch a rockfish, we have to make sure that we can lease quota from a quota holder. We're fully responsible and accountable for that fish.

Even DFO, on the licence transfer programs for the native or communal fisheries, is presenting us with some challenges. The reason is that all of our licence-holders pay a small fee for us to be able to have the association, to do the co-management agreements, and to undertake the surveys, but in terms of the quota that's bought and the licences for those programs, the department normally holds them, and they don't pay any fees.

As a result, we're not as pressured as some other fisheries, but over time, unless a solution is found at the legislative level to set conditions of licence, the federal department's ability to co-manage in a whole number of species is going to be undermined. Halibut would probably be before us, but it is still a problem.

These are long-lived fish in deep waters. The fish itself is reared in inlets. The fishermen, the licence holders, have voluntarily closed the inlets to fishing for a number of years, because we see those as the nursery and the incubator for the fish. The market is usually for three- to seven-pound fish.

We've undertaken a different approach to the development of this fishery over the last three years. We knew that the volume would have to go down, so we switched over to a value fishery. We switched over to creating new markets for this fish and diversifying beyond Japan. As a result, I can tell you that three years ago the fish was selling at the dock for about $4.23 per pound. Last week, on auction, it got $7.94 per pound, so even with a significantly reduced quota, the value is still there in this fishery, and will continue to be as we diversify into other product forms.

On the issue of aquaculture, our association has taken the position that we support aquaculture as long as it is properly regulated and as long as a precautionary approach is taken in establishing finfish farms, in particular when government decides that they can do it in open pens in the ocean.

We have concerns about the health of our stock. There are parasites, such as lice, that can be transferred from other species such as salmon. We are very concerned about some of the diseases. There's a weird disease called furunculosis and vibriosis, which can be deadly. When these outbreaks happen in a volume in a closed containment, they can kill the entire volume in that containment. Indeed, we've seen that happen in one of the few sablefish farms that are currently operating in British Columbia. It happened last year. There was an outbreak of furunculosis, and the entire brood stock was killed. We're concerned that those types of outbreaks not get into our wild stocks because, simply, we just don't have enough science to tell us what would happen if indeed there was a significant outbreak.

We've carefully watched the salmon situation evolve, and I think everybody around this table would say that if we could do it again, we certainly would do it differently. There is huge controversy out there about the open-penned salmon farms and their impact on wild salmon. You've heard from Dr. Alexandra Morton, with whom we work closely; she certainly has evidence and a view about how the open-penned system could have had an impact on some of the wild species, the stocks that are currently in decline and that are the subject of a judicial inquiry.

The issue we've had is that there is a need for a gap analysis on the science around sablefish, just as should have been done before there was widespread licensing of salmon farms. This is in its infancy. I think we have one hatchery, and probably three or four operations under way. We don't really have good information. When this industry was being regulated by the provincial government, it was very difficult to get our hands on numbers. We think there are between 40 and 50 licences out there. Three are operational; the others, to become operational, will have to be approved.

We quite simply don't know where this fishery is going. We do know we've built value in our fishery. We do know that parasitic transmission has happened in other species. It's happened in ours. We urged the provincial government, when they were still in charge of aquaculture licensing in the waters of British Columbia, to, number one, do a gap analysis; number two, not license any more open-penned farms for sablefish; and number three, do closed-containment studies. We offered to participate fully in the financing of it and to provide any data that were necessary so that we could build a database that would allow for the proper development of sablefish farming, if indeed the economics, the biology, and the science were all there for it.

I have a number of other things, but I'm really conscious of your time. If anybody has questions on them, there are some other areas I would like to get into. These include such things as the transfer and the court case of September 2, 2009, involving Justice Hinkson, which basically indicated that the 1988 agreement transferring licensing responsibility to the Province of British Columbia was not constitutional. The federal Department of Fisheries and Oceans is currently developing rules and regulations to take over the administration of aquaculture in Canada for our situation in British Columbia. There is also the potential impact that improper regulations could have on the future of the wild Canadian sablefish industry.

[The Chair, Conservative, Rodney Weston]

Thank you very much, Mr. MacDonald.

Please go ahead, Mr. Dill.

[Dr. Lawrence Dill, Professor Emeritus, Department of Biological Sciences, Simon Fraser University]

First of all, thank you for the opportunity to appear before you this afternoon, if only on television. I appreciate the amount of trouble some people have gone to to arrange this.

I'm a professor of ecology at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, and I've been doing research on salmon and other marine species for over 40 years. I've published over 140 scientific papers, and my work has been recognized through my election as a fellow of the Royal Society of Canada.

Together with my graduate students I've written several scientific papers on sea lice. I've also served as a member of the BC Pacific Salmon Forum's scientific advisory committee, and I helped to design their Broughton ecosystem research program. I also co-wrote a major report on sea lice and aquaculture for the World Wildlife Fund. I think I can be called a credible scientist, a point I will return to a little later.

In the ongoing debate about the effect of sea lice on wild salmon, it's easy to be confused by the claims and counterclaims, especially when the press reports them as being equally valid. However, some of these claims--mainly those by credible independent scientists--are far more likely to be true than the opinions and half-truths you hear from spokesmen for the aquaculture industry, with their clearly vested interests, or from scientists who work for agencies, whether provincial or federal, that are mandated to support aquaculture.

If I may be excused for a moment for sounding like a professor giving a lecture, I think it's important to explain just what is meant by science. The best definition I've heard is that science is a way of knowing. It's a process by which we come to understand the natural world. A scientist is someone who uses the scientific method to gain this understanding. Incidentally, one doesn't have to have a doctorate, honorary or otherwise, to be able to do that.

The basic scientific method involves proposing a hypothesis to explain a phenomenon and then seeking information to refute it. This might come from observation or, in the best-case scenario, from an experiment. If we cannot refute it, we feel more confident that our hypothesis is true, but we don't say that it's proven. We accept it and continue to try to refute it with new tests. If all the results of all our tests and observations agree, then we become pretty confident that our hypothesis is true.

We then have to communicate this new knowledge to other scientists, and that's where it becomes difficult. We write it up as a paper, and we send it to a journal. They assign anonymous referees, who pick our work apart and try to find reasons not to publish it. If we're lucky, we may have to make only a few minor changes before the paper is accepted. If not, they may require major changes, or they may reject it outright. The better the journal, the more difficult it is to get a paper published and the more confidence other scientists can have in its conclusions.

Now, I mentioned that in an ideal world, the best way to test a hypothesis is by experiment. For example, if we think that effect A is related to some putative cause B, we remove cause B and see what happens. This is easy to do in a laboratory but is very difficult to do in the field. Fortunately, in the Broughton Archipelago, experiments of this sort have actually been done twice. In 2003 there was a provincially mandated fallow of the farms, and the adult pink salmon returns the following year rebounded. From 2006 to 2008, the farms started treating their fish just prior to the out-migration period of the wild fry. Again, this caused fewer lice on the juveniles and dramatically increased adult returns. This is actually very strong evidence for a farm effect.

That's where we are with sea lice and wild salmon. All the information we have supports the hypothesis that sea lice are produced in large numbers in open-net salmon farms, that in their infective stages they attack the juvenile wild salmon swimming by, often in high enough numbers to kill them, and that this causes the wild stock of salmon to decline.

This is my assessment. It is based on my own work and that of others, including, especially, Dr. Martin Krkosek, whom you heard from last week. His work, it's worth noting, has been published in the very best journals in the field, those with the highest reviewing standards. His conclusions and those of others, including mine and Alexandra Morton's, should not come as any surprise. Exactly the same thing has happened virtually everywhere in the world where salmon farming in open-net cages has been practised, whether in Norway or Ireland or Scotland, so contrary to the absolute nonsense claimed by provincial veterinarian Mark Sheppard, there are a rather large number of credible scientists, me included, who disagree with him when he says that there is insufficient information to suggest that lice on farms is affecting Pacific salmon in a detrimental way.

I said earlier that science never proves anything absolutely. There is always a small element of uncertainty; it may be very small, but no matter how small, it's inappropriate to seize on this uncertainty to discredit the work. Seizing on uncertainty is a common tactic of people who don't want to believe the results, from those who deny climate change to tobacco companies. It's a bogus argument. The conclusions that scientists are coming to are more than strongly enough supported that DFO should be invoking the precautionary principle and getting the salmon farms out of the migration routes of wild salmon.

Thank you very much.

[The Chair, Conservative, Rodney Weston]

Thank you, Mr. Dill.

Go ahead, Mr. MacAulay.

[Lawrence MacAulay, Liberal, Cardigan, PE]

Thank you very much.

Welcome, both of you. It's a pleasure to have you here. We certainly have heard a lot of information on this issue, and as Mr. Dill has indicated, we've heard a lot of conflicting information.

Mr. MacDonald, you were talking about NPAs, national protected areas. I would like you to elaborate a bit on that as well as the transfers, the court cases, and the federal regulations that have been put in place because of the court case. I suspect that's what you were talking about.

Mr. Dill, if you have time, we've heard conflicting reports on sea lice. Nobody has said that sea lice do not come from the wild, but the lice reproduce so much in confined areas. That needs to be explained a bit more clearly.

I think that's enough for right now.

[Ron MacDonald]

Thank you, Mr. MacAulay.

I cannot overstate my support for Mr. Dill, the work that he's done, the work that other credible scientists have done. I think it's very unfortunate that some scientists from the Department of Fisheries and Oceans have basically gone out to undermine the credibility of these very credible individuals. It does nothing to add to the debate; what it does is divide good people from finding the right solutions. I just wanted to say that about Mr. Dill's commentary.

[Lawrence MacAulay, Liberal, Cardigan, PE]

Mr. MacDonald, if you could add, on the 1.7 million pieces that returned instead of the 10 million or 11 million, how do you think sea lice might have affected that?

[Ron MacDonald]

Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

I manage a wild fishery. We have a lot of regulations, and they're there for good reason. The regulations are there to ensure the health of the stock and to ensure that we don't take more than what the stock can sustain. We're trying to develop these fisheries for the economic benefit of Canadians. This is a public fishery. As a former member of this place, a former chairman of this committee, and now as someone who works in the industry, I don't think my view is biased. I read everything I can, but I can tell you that the way the department has handled the wild fishery and the way they have handled the aquaculture industry are completely different.

I don't know if you heard from Alexandra Morton when she was here, because I didn't have the chance to read her testimony, but last year I took her to Ottawa. We visited the minister and a lot of people who are at this table. She was seeking the federal government's action to do something as this tragedy unfolded.

What really struck me was how one department can be so inconsistent in the application of the law. We can't go out on a vessel and turn our lights on. It's called pit-lamping. You can't do that at night because it attracts all the food. It attracts the fish. Everything in the water is attracted to the lights.

These fish farms have lights on in the pens all night. They're there to try to force growth, or whatever the biology is, but they are attracting wild fish, both as feed and to find feed. They're attracting them into the pens where there is a hyperabundance of sea lice and disease, if there is any.

We can't do it, so when we came to Ottawa, we asked the department to invoke the regulations in the same way they do with the wild fishery. We also said that dockside monitoring was needed. We have to count and measure every single fish, but there isn't the same dockside monitoring for the aquaculture industry. It's illegal for you to catch a sablefish and sell it unless you have a licence, but we know from individuals who have worked in the aquaculture sector that other species are landed when they fish out their farmed salmon, but they are not accounted for. If you did it, Mr. Chairman, you would face a charge under the Fisheries Act, but it seems that when it's over on the aquaculture side, the farmed side, they get away without anything happening.

As somebody who believes in ecosystem-based management and looks after an association that puts a million dollars a year into science, it is aggravating as hell to see that another part of our industry does not operate under the same terms and conditions. It's one of the fundamental things that hopefully your committee will be able to get to.

The other thing deals with the judgment from September last year that the 1988 agreement transferring responsibility for licensing for aquaculture to the province was indeed unconstitutional. Here's my concern. If anybody is going to regulate aquaculture, I want it to be the federal government. I've made that clear from the get-go, because the provincial government had no responsibility for wild stocks. The only responsibility they had until that judgment was for aquaculture.

I know of many instances, some of which I've raised directly with the provincial minister, in which there was a conflict. Clearly they would always go where their jurisdiction was, and that was to protect aquaculture and not the wild stock. The federal minister has a fiduciary responsibility to protect the public fishery, to protect that wild stock; if there is an inconsistency in demand or application, I want to make sure that somebody who's accountable to Parliament will be looking after their responsibilities in managing these wild stocks.

My concern is that it's been over a year since that ruling. The decision is under appeal, but what's under appeal isn't whether or not the jurisdictional decision was right--nobody's appealing that--it's who owns the fish in the pens. Is this a wild fish? Does it belong to the farms?

The fundamental problem I have with this issue raging in British Columbia, and potentially coming to a pen with sablefish in it pretty soon, is that nobody in my sector has been consulted. The department is out there putting together new rules to take over aquaculture, which I think is appropriate, but there has been no consultation. To have bad rules and regulations for the feds to take over will just make the situation worse.

I hope this committee will see that as an oversight and that it can deal with the department as these rules are developed, so that all stakeholders, be they farmers or be they recreational or commercial fishermen, would have some input through the committee.

[Dr. Lawrence Dill]

Could I respond to the question that was put?

First of all, there seemed to be some confusion about lice and where they came from, so let me try to clarify that no one denies that lice are a natural parasite of salmon and always have been. As a kid, I'd catch an adult salmon, and it would have lice on it. There is no question about that.

The problem is that we've put fish farms in the middle of a migratory path that wild salmon pass by on their way in, in the summer and fall, and the juvenile salmon pass on their way out, in the spring. In the meantime, these lice build up to large levels on the farmed fish. This is not part of the normal system. In the normal system that cycle would be broken, because the lice would die when the adult fish return to fresh water, so it's not a question of whether they come ultimately from the wild or from the farm. Yes, they ultimately come from the wild, but the farm is basically having a multiplier effect in the system.

Could I also respond to the comment about the controversy, which I began my talk with? I think I may still have a couple of minutes left of that.

You frequently hear people say that DFO studies show that when you put salmon in a tank and you challenge them with sea lice, if the salmon are over 0.7 grams, they seem to mount an effective immune response and they're just fine, so we don't have anything to worry about. My problem with that point of view is that the science involved is not as much wrong as it is totally irrelevant.

Let me do a thought experiment to maybe clarify this for you. Imagine suddenly being deprived of your eyes and your ears. You're blind and you're deaf and you're placed in a room where someone brings you food every day and takes care of all your other needs. You would survive for a good long period of time. Now let's imagine that you are put outdoors, still blind and still deaf, and no one feeds you. There are freeways running back and forth and you have to cross those freeways to get your food. I don't think you would survive for very long.

That's exactly what I think is going on in the wild. We have considerable evidence that juvenile fish that are parasitized by sea lice are far more vulnerable to predation by trout and larger salmonids. These fish don't have time to mount an immune response; they get eaten and removed from the population.

That, I think, is the difference between a laboratory-based approach looking at immune responses and a field ecological approach looking at the actual impacts on the fish in a wild system where there are predators, diseases, competition, and so on.

Thank you.

[Lawrence MacAulay, Liberal, Cardigan, PE]

Mr. Dill, are those fish farms in the wrong place? Could they be situated in places that wouldn't cost so much? If they're not in the migratory path, would that solve some of the problem, or is just basically the case that fish farms cause a problem no matter where they are?

[Dr. Lawrence Dill]

I believe that if they were located farther seaward they would cause less of a problem, because when the juvenile fish reached there, they would be somewhat larger and perhaps less vulnerable. However, I don't think you could ever move them far enough away that they wouldn't be on the migratory path of some salmon population, unless you went out to the open ocean.

[The Chair, Conservative, Rodney Weston]

Thank you, Mr. Dill.

Go ahead, Monsieur Blais.

[Raynald Blais, Bloc, Gaspésie—Îles-de-la-Madeleine, QC]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Good day, Mr. Dill.

Good day, Mr. MacDonald.

I will be directing my comments and questions primarily to Mr. Dill, as they are somewhat related to what Lawrence just talked about. When issues come up for discussion, or when there are contradicting opinions like those we have heard so far, it usually means that we have touched upon the most important element to consider when making sense of the issue at hand. In other words, laboratory studies are one thing; and field studies are, or can be, quite another.

Aside from that, are there any other elements we should closely consider in order to put things in perspective? I hope that you understand that when I hear from two scientists with two contrary or greatly dissenting opinions, I wonder what parameters—aside from plain old common sense—I should consider to get a better grasp of the issue.

[Dr. Lawrence Dill]

That's a very good question. I would say that you look at the source as part of it. You see who's saying that and whether they're independent or working for an aquaculture company or some agency that has a vested interest in continuing with salmon aquaculture in the way it's currently practised. That's one way to look at it.

No matter what scientific question is asked, it's not uncommon for scientists to have dissenting opinions. The way science works is by a back-and-forth and a winnowing of the evidence until eventually the weight of evidence builds up strongly enough on one side that the hypothesis of interest is accepted.

I've looked at some of the testimonies given before this committee, and one of the things I don't think has come across clearly enough is that.... People have criticized the work, for example, of Dr. Krkosek. They have written commentaries saying why they think he's wrong. What has not come across clearly enough is that Krkosek and others have written counter-critiques showing why those criticisms are wrong. You never hear about that from the people who write the original criticisms.

Science is a process in which there is a lot of back-and-forth, but eventually the weight of evidence comes down on the one side or the other. This is an issue you will have to deal with when you believe the weight of evidence is strong enough to support the hypothesis that I believe to be true.

[Raynald Blais, Bloc, Gaspésie—Îles-de-la-Madeleine, QC]

I can reassure you somewhat, since the testimony I heard from Mr. Krkosek, in my opinion—and I have a feeling that it won't change—is the testimony that shed the most light on the issue thus far.

In addition, as far as the type of containment we might eventually use, I understand that if we have a containment set up in the high seas, in fresh water, or in salt water, and it can hold a certain number of fish, especially salmon, the environment is somewhat different from that in the wild. So, there are various problems that must be either noted, avoided, or verified. Is there an ideal type of containment we should go with? Is there an ideal type of farming we should practice?

[Dr. Lawrence Dill]

From my perspective, the best thing to do is to get the fish into a system where there's not a free exchange of water, parasites, and diseases between the farmed and the wild fish. That could be on land or it could be bags in the ocean, but there needs to be a physical separation between them. I'm very much in support of closed containment because it would solve many of the problems of aquaculture. Those problems are not restricted to sea lice, of course.

[Ron MacDonald]

I want to support that idea. Unfortunately the debate gets to be very heated about being either for or against aquaculture. The debate should really be on what kind of aquaculture will give the benefits we need. The one thing I do know is that the wild stocks are declining, the world demand for high-quality protein is growing, and when it's done right it can address all those needs and create economic activity.

One of the problems, Mr. Blais, is that as the aquaculture industry developed, there was no real environmental impact study done; it was developed on the assumption that it would have no impact. By the time the rules were put in place, companies—mostly foreign companies—had put hundreds of millions of dollars into developing these operations. Now they have an economic argument saying the economics don't work on closed containment. Well, if you had an operation in which your costs were fixed at 40% of income and somebody said that you now had to do something different and that it was going up to 50%, you would fight that tooth and nail because it's money out of your pocket.

The question should be whether there is a way to do this. My answer would be yes, and it's closed containment. Make sure, as Mr. Dill has said, that there is no interaction between the wild stocks and the farm stocks. It is being done economically in some places. Mr. Dill might know more about this, but I know I've received some emails in the last few weeks about it.

When you go over to my fish, sablefish, we're not $1.50-a-pound fish; we're an $8-a-pound fish. If you can't do closed containment on sablefish, you can't do it on any fish. We're one of the priciest fish in the world.

So closed containment is the option. To the provincial government we've even offered to put money into a closed-containment study for our stocks. Quite frankly, we don't want the disaster and the controversy of salmon to be visited on a healthy stock that we get more per pound for every year and that we fish sustainably.

[The Chair, Conservative, Rodney Weston]

Thank you.

Go ahead, Mr. Donnelly.

[Fin Donnelly, NDP, New Westminster—Coquitlam, BC]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

I would like to thank Mr. MacDonald and Dr. Dill for making your presentations. I could say that you both have provided very clear testimony and made very strong statements linking sea lice from fish farms to wild salmon.

When I've even suggested that, I've been called irresponsible. In fact, I presented a private member's bill just recently looking to move to closed containment for aquaculture, so I certainly appreciate what you're both saying and hearing your information.

I do have a few questions. Perhaps I could start with Dr. Dill.

We've heard a lot about how sea lice can impact wild salmon. Could you just walk me through how lice actually kill wild salmon? How does that happen?