It's an international workshop that happens every year. It just happened to be in British Columbia this year, but, again, we're hearing all the learning from Europe in particular, which has a really hard time seemingly to penetrate on this coast. We seem to be pioneers here. We have to reinvent the wheel all the time too. Again, we've heard a lot from people who deal with chemical treatments of sea lice, which is the major pest. There are something like 300 million euros spent every year around the world combatting sea lice. That's a factor that's not taken into account in terms of open-net-cage aquaculture either in the analyses.
I do want to finish with one thing on change, because you brought that up, Fin. I'd like to say that humans are notorious for resisting change. They cling to outdated ideas and practices even though they know these are damaging. You can look at all kinds of human behaviours that are self-destructive, and I won't go into those, but there have been many studies looking at this from an ecological standpoint. One of the biggest drivers to get somebody to change is they finally get into a crisis so deep that they have to look themselves in the mirror and say they have to change.
We've had a crisis with our Fraser sockeye. We've had the worst returns on record in the last year on the Fraser River, and to Minister Shea's credit, she called an inquiry into the problems here. We've had a crisis with salmon farming on this coast, which is the main reason why we're seeing some change on this coast, and it's not happening fast enough to save certain stocks of fish. So we should be looking at why people resist change. There's lots of literature out there on that. But we do have a crisis, we have to change, and it has to happen fairly soon.