Fisheries Committee on May 12th, 2010

[The Chair, Conservative, Rodney Weston]

Thank you very much.

Gentlemen, on behalf of the committee, I'd like to thank you once again for taking the time out of your busy schedules to meet with us, hear our concerns and questions, and attempt to answer our questions. Thank you on behalf of the committee.

We'll take a short break while we prepare for our next witnesses.

[The Chair, Conservative, Rodney Weston]

Ladies and gentlemen, on behalf of the committee, thank you for taking the time to meet with us today to share your thoughts and to try to answer any questions that committee members might have.

I believe most of you heard my comments earlier about the timeframes that committee members are constrained by so that we can try to get as many questions and answers in as possible. We generally allow 10 minutes per presentation, and committee members know the time constraints they work within.

Mr. Hobson, I believe you will begin. The floor is yours, Mr. Hobson.

[Eric Hobson, President, Save Our Salmon Marine Conservation Foundation]

Mr. Chair, committee members, thank you for the opportunity to speak with you today. My name is Eric Hobson. I'm president of the SOS Marine Conservation Foundation. I hold a bachelor's degree in engineering from Carleton University.

I am co-founder of Northridge Petroleum Marketing, which was sold to TransCanada Corporation, and MetroNet Communications, which ultimately merged with AT&T Canada. I am a founding shareholder of over 50 companies. My success in business has allowed me to establish the SOS foundation. My love of the ocean comes from many childhood summers fishing near Vancouver Island with my father and grandfather.

For the record, I have no financial interest in the aquaculture industry or the development of closed containment.

With me today is Dr. Andrew Wright. Andrew, would you please introduce yourself?

[Dr. Andrew Wright, Representative, Save Our Salmon Marine Conservation Foundation]

Hello. My name is Andrew Wright. I have a PhD in engineering from the University of Hullin England. I have over 50 patents to my name, and I'm a published peer-reviewed scientist.

I've been working on closed-containment aquaculture for the Save Our Salmon campaign for over two years now, approaching this as a working product every day. We have come to the conclusion that closed containment is economically and technically viable.

[Eric Hobson]

Catherine, would you please introduce yourself?

[Catherine Emrick, Senior Associate, Aquaculture Innovation, Tides Canada, Save Our Salmon Marine Conservation Foundation]

My name is Catherine Emrick. I'm a senior associate in aquaculture innovation with Tides Canada, a charitable foundation that provides financial and project management services to philanthropists and others. Essentially we pool ideas and resources to help solve complex social and environmental problems.

I hold a bachelor of laws degree and a MBA from the University of Calgary, and I'm a fellow of the Certified General Accountants Association. I've worked with Eric on the aquaculture issue for three years. When I'm not working on this issue, I practise regulatory law in Nunavut with Miller Thomson LLP.

[Eric Hobson]

Dr. Wright and Ms. Emrick are both members of the SOS foundation's solutions advisory committee.

I hope you have the handout; I thought maybe we could follow along on that.

On page 2, slide 2, if you'd flip to that, SOS is a charitable foundation that funds economic, scientific, and legal research, as well as public education. The solutions advisory committee is a broad coalition of business leaders, entrepreneurs, and professionals. We look for solutions to resolve marine conservation challenges. In doing so, we work collaboratively with scientists, first nations, salmon farmers, and environmental groups.

On slide 3, we are committed to working collaboratively with the federal and B.C. governments to achieve two fundamental goals: first, to protect B.C.'s wild salmon stocks and all that depends on them; second, to establish B.C. as a leader in creating a globally renowned, stable, and viable aquaculture industry.

I know that you've heard from a number of witnesses, including Dr. Krkosek, about the science around the impacts of open-net aquaculture. There is certainly a lot of debate.

It is our belief that there is sufficient peer-reviewed and published research in independent journals to support taking action. More importantly for the purpose of my presentation today, it is clear that there is a lack of public confidence in the regulation of open-net salmon aquaculture in B.C., and there cannot be growth in that industry until public confidence is restored. The shift in jurisdiction from B.C. to DFO has created a window of opportunity to rebuild public confidence and establish a viable aquaculture industry.

On slide 4, SOS proposes a three-point strategy to do this. In the short term, develop and implement a workable fallow and farm management plan to protect the most critical and threatened wild salmon. In the medium term, create a more transparent and accountable regulatory regime for finfish aquaculture. In the long term, catalyze a made-in-Canada, world-class, closed-containment aquaculture industry.

More specifically, to provide immediate relief to the Fraser River sockeye and begin restoring public confidence in the regulation of aquaculture in B.C., we recommend that DFO work with salmon farmers to expand the existing Broughton area management plan to protect the next generation of Fraser River salmon migrating through a high density of open-net cage salmon farms in the northern Georgia Strait.

We understand the key farms for removal of adult farm fish—and I'm talking about harvest, not permanent removal—are believed to be Venture Point, Cyrus Rocks, and the Okesola Sonora farm. However, this is subject to confirmation of the current stocking of these farms. This is information that is not currently publicly available, yet key to the risk management strategy. This should be accompanied by an independent sea lice monitoring program modelled after the program in the Broughton, which monitors both farmed and wild fish.

Regarding the creation of a transparent and accountable regulatory regime, SOS participated in DFO's formal process. A summary of our written recommendations is provided in our brief to you.

In short, the core elements of an effective new regulatory regime include, first, giving express priority to DFO's statutory obligation to protect and conserve fish and fish habitat over the growth of the aquaculture industry. It is essential to separate the functions of protection of wild fish and the promotion of aquaculture.

One mechanism to do this is the creation of an independent aquaculture licensing board and monitoring body. The second one is establishing science-based siting criteria, thresholds, and limits for effects outside the farm, and related monitoring, including on the wild salmon and other exposed marine life. The third one is addressing the prevention and monitoring of bycatch and impacts on predators, consistent with the approaches used in the commercial fisheries. The fourth mechanism is mandatory, timely, public reporting requirements for disease, parasites, and therapeutant use when entering the marine environment.

We will move to slide 6. The longer-term solution is to embrace the technological innovation that will lead to a sustainable aquaculture industry capable of supporting the growth goals set out in DFO's national aquaculture strategic planning initiative.

To move this forward, SOS funded, with the help of DFO and the B.C. government, a report by Dr. Wright on the feasibility of land-based closed-containment technology. Essentially, Dr. Wright's report concludes that it is technically and economically feasible.

In April, in collaboration with Simon Fraser University, we hosted a workshop to further explore the viability of this technology. Over 60 people from DFO, the B.C. government, first nations, industry, investors, environmental and conservation foundations, and academics participated. At the workshop, DFO presented a consultation draft of their study into the economic feasibility of this technology. While the results are not as favourable as Dr. Wright's, overall there's a convergence of views that it is now time to at least explore land-based closed-containment aquaculture as a more biosecure alternative to open-net technology.

To take the next step, the SOS foundation is working with the Namgis First Nation to develop a demonstration project to prove that salmon can be grown to full size at commercial densities and to validate the assumptions necessary to assess the potential for commercial-scale viability. We know that there are other similar projects under development. To ensure these projects are properly funded, Tides Canada is working to bring together funders and a governance framework through the creation of an innovation fund. To date, $5 million of philanthropic funding has been committed, provided that matching funds from government and industry are found. We encourage you to recommend that government work with Tides Canada to coordinate philanthropic and government funding for closed-containment demonstration projects.

Slide 7 summarizes what we are asking the committee to recommend. First is the immediate emergency removal of adult fish on a key migratory route of the Fraser River sockeye. Second is the development of a transparent and accountable regulatory regime with clear priority on the protection and conservation of wild fish and fish habitat. Third is taking leadership to catalyze the closed-containment industry by coordinating government funding programs to match philanthropic and private investment, and working with B.C. to prioritize the development of a regulatory regime specific to land-based closed containment.

In closing, there are a number of benefits that will flow from this approach. B.C., with its advantages of clean water, low-cost hydroelectricity with low greenhouse gas emissions, crown land, and an existing workforce skilled in salmon farming techniques, could start expanding the use of off-the-shelf systems. The aquaculture industry will have more certainty in decision-making.

Most importantly, priority will be properly placed on the protection of B.C.'s wild salmon, and public confidence will be restored in the regulation of aquaculture in B.C.

Thank you again for the opportunity to present our recommendations. We would be pleased to answer any questions you may have.

[The Chair, Conservative, Rodney Weston]

Thank you, Mr. Hobson.

Mr. Orr is next.

[Craig Orr, Executive Director, Watershed Watch Salmon Society]

Thank you very much for the time. I apologize that I don't have a lot of prepared notes. I've been at a sea lice workshop here in Victoria, at which there was a lot of talk about resistance of sea lice to chemical treatments. I don't really have a lot of notes prepared, but I do have a couple comments.

My training is in biology. I have a Master of Science in wildlife ecology and a PhD in behavioural ecology. I'm the executive director of Watershed Watch Salmon Society and also the science coordinator for the Coastal Alliance for Aquaculture Reform.

My involvement in the interactions of wild and farmed salmon goes back to about 1999, but in particular it geared up quite a bit in 2001 when we saw the first-ever sea lice outbreaks on juvenile Pacific salmon on the coast of British Columbia.

Since that time my major focus has been on aquaculture and aquaculture interactions between wild and farmed fish. I've helped to organize seven international workshops as the associate director for the Centre for Coastal Studies at Simon Fraser University and as the executive director of Watershed Watch. We brought in scientists from around the world to share their experiences and their science concerning the impacts of sea lice.

In 2004 we began working with the largest salmon farming company in Canada--and in the world, actually--Stolt Sea Farm, now Marine Harvest Canada. The goals of that work were to improve the understanding of and transparency around the data from salmon farms and the interactions between wild and farmed fish, and to undertake management actions that would reduce infection pressures on wild fish.

In 2006 part of that work involved monitoring lice on some of the Marine Harvest farms on a weekly basis during the out-migration of juvenile fish and also looking at the effects of biocides on those lice. The results of that research will be coming out in a paper shortly.

I have also published several other papers on the interactions of farmed and wild salmon, and in particular I have looked at the production of lice on salmon farms.

In that work, and in particular in the workshops that we've hosted with Simon Fraser, we've built up a considerable weight of evidence and reviewed the science around the impacts of salmon farms around the world. What we know from that science--you may have already heard some of this, and I apologize if it's redundant--is that 95% of the lice in coastal waters around the world come from salmon farms. They are actually manufacturing lots of lice because of the high density of farmed fish.

You have to understand that our salmon farms on this coast are extremely large. A typical farm is about 725,000 farmed salmon, which is much larger than the farms in Europe. To put that in perspective, that's a mass equivalent of about 500 Asian bull elephants swimming around in a farm.

We've looked at that science. We've looked at the fact that we've altered the natural ecology of our coastal oceans. In particular what we've done is reverse the natural laws of what's called migration allopatry. That means simply that juvenile fish leaving rivers typically did not encounter, over historic times, large numbers of adult lice-bearing salmon in coastal waters.

They're quite small when they leave the rivers. The juvenile pink and chum salmon weigh less than a gram when they emerge from the gravel and go to sea. The adult salmon were in the high seas feeding at the time, and although they may have hosted several lice per fish, they weren't shedding those lice eggs while the juveniles were going by, so there was a separation--migration allopatry--between the wild juvenile fish and the adult fish when we had a natural ecology on this coast.

Right now we cultivate farm fish, and the evidence suggests that they are producing substantial numbers of lice. I published a paper in 2007 in the North American Journal of Fisheries Management looking at production patterns on marine harvest farms. We waited several years, prodding Fisheries and Oceans Canada, which had that data, to publish the information. They did not, so we undertook that ourselves.

What I showed in this paper was that these farms--we were looking at just eight of them--were producing billions of lice eggs and infectious larvae every year. In particular, they were producing very large spikes of lice just before the juvenile fish migrated past the farms, and we're still seeing this pattern to this day in western Canada.

Some of the other science backs me up on the fact that we're seeing large production of lice from these farms.

In 2009 Mark Costello, a leading researcher in New Zealand, said “There's no doubt that salmon farms are the major source of sea lice epizootics observed in wild fish around the world.”

All the scientists came together in 2007 at a workshop in Alert Bay in British Columbia and said there was no doubt that salmon farms cause impacts around the world. That was true from Ireland, Scotland, Norway. The statement of expectation, which is printed in the workshop proceedings, also said it's time to act, to deal with these impacts. The situation in British Columbia is exacerbated by the small size and vulnerability of the pink salmon and chum salmon, in particular, but we have seen lice on all species of Pacific salmon, all six, including steelhead.

There are also papers out there that show population levels of effect. Several papers have looked at the effects of lice on individual fish. It's a little harder to translate those into population level impacts. In particular, I draw your attention to a paper done by Jennifer Ford and the late Ransom Myers, of Dalhousie University, published in 2009, in which they did a paired bay comparison of salmon farms around the world. What that means is they looked at areas in Ireland, Scotland, Norway, and British Columbia. They looked at one bay where there were no salmon farms and they looked at one bay where there were salmon farms, and that way they were able to control for all sources of mortality. What they said very conclusively in this peer-reviewed paper was that salmon farms are the major source of declines of wild fish around the world. Their meta-analysis left no doubt of that. In fact, they found that on average, wherever there was salmon farming, there was a 50% decline in wild fish survival, around the world. British Columbia is simply the latest place where this is happening.

Unfortunately, although there are papers like this out there, there is also a recent one by Dr. Martin Krkosek in one of the pre-eminent science journals in the world, showing rapid declines in survival of pink salmon in the Broughton Archipelago. We have a very large amount of debate still happening in British Columbia. In fact, I just saw that debate rear its ugly head again at the workshop where we had the senior scientist from DFO, Dr. Dick Beamish, refusing to answer any questions whatsoever at a sea lice workshop on whether sea lice were causing impacts on wild fish. It's a debate that's been going on for far too long. The science on this coast has been ignored and distorted, in particular by management agencies, to a point where it's embarrassing to be a Canadian at times, to see the kind of science that is coming out of our federal government. In fact, some resource ecologists studying these problems around the world call this resource management pathology, and it's a recurring situation around the world.

Let me just sum it up. I can't sum it up any more eloquently than the great Buzz Holling, a pre-eminent Canadian ecologist who lives in Nanaimo. He says: “While science uses uncertainty to drive the engine of inquiry, vested interest groups use and foster uncertainty to maintain a status quo policy.”

This is clearly demonstrated probably more so in the sea lice communications plan that came out a few years ago in which the communications branch of the Department of Fisheries and Oceans urged its scientists, when they were talking about this situation in public, to extol a complexity of ecosystems and the need for more research before we can definitively ascribe these losses of wild fish to salmon farms. This was again carried to heights that were absolutely absurd.

The last piece of evidence I'll bring before I bring this to a conclusion is a recent criticism of Dr. Dick Beamish, who published a paper called “A proposed life history strategy for the salmon louse, Lepeophtheirus salmonis, in the subarctic Pacific“. He published this in a journal called Aquaculture, which is not a well-known ecology journal, in which he normally publishes papers. He talked about alternate life history strategies where these sea lice are coming from. Of course we heard from DFO back in the mid-2000s that sea lice were coming from wild fish, they were coming from sticklebacks, they were coming from everywhere except salmon farms. An academic, Dr. Dill, whom I believe you just heard from, wrote a review of Beamish's paper, and I'll just cite a couple of lines and I'll finish off on that:

Beamish's paper is curious in failing to mention farm salmon host in the Broughton Archipelago

--and this is in a paper that looks at alternate life history strategies of sea lice--

despite this being the only place on the coast where newly emerged wild fry are heavily parasitized. ...Beamish's errors of omission and their selective use of their own and others' data lead the naive reader to a conclusion that cannot be substantiated. Their “conclusion” that the “transport of sea lice in the coastal areas is an evolutionary adaptation” is unwarranted and, indeed, is not a conclusion at all. In fact, the presence of farmed salmon along the migration routes of very young wild salmon represents an anthropogenic or human perturbation to a natural host-parasite system....

You know, these are pretty strong statements from an academic. Unfortunately, we still don't seem to have our federal government onside. We have had, of course, our Auditor General twice cite the Department of Fisheries and Oceans as being in a conflict of interest because they're simultaneously trying to promote salmon farming and protect wild salmon.

Unfortunately, we've had a lot of problems getting the clear science out there, which is probably why we're at this session right now. But there is really no doubt that salmon farms are exacerbating the problems with wild salmon around the world, mainly through sea lice, but also through disease, and I haven't touched on the other issues of escaped fish, and pollutants. We did publish a paper, as well, looking at how mercury is transported through the feed, then bio-magnified back up through the food chain, and it appears in rockfish around the salmon farms. So there are other problems with salmon farms.

All the researchers we talked to suggest that sea lice are a major problem around the world and the treatments for those sea lice are starting to fail. We just heard from researcher after researcher, from Norway, Scotland, and Ireland, saying their treatments for sea lice are failing, and we can expect the same to happen here.

Thank you.

[The Chair, Conservative, Rodney Weston]

Thank you, Mr. Orr.

Mr. Andrews.

[Scott Andrews, Liberal, Avalon, NL]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

I've got three questions and I'll see if we can get through them.

Mr. Wright, when we talk about a world-class closed containment aquaculture industry, we haven't really seen any of it here in Canada right now. I'd like for you to give me a little bit of background of why we haven't seen it, and more importantly, the economics behind this that were alluded to. I'm curious to know the economics behind the closed containment type of system and why we haven't seen it. How come some of the companies aren't embracing this?

[Dr. Andrew Wright]

I can't speak to why you haven't seen it. What I would speak to is that closed containment technology has been demonstrated successfully in many other species worldwide. The United States department of aquaculture has been running a recirculating closed containment research program for 30 years, and all the components you might need to build a closed containment farm are commercially available as off-the-shelf pieces of equipment from multiple vendors.

So we can go and build a closed containment farm today without any access or technology barriers, and you can do that economically. We can get into that if you wish. Why it hasn't happened in Canada, I can't speak to specifically. My work was focused 100% on whether it is technically and economically viable, and I believe that has been proven. But as the previous gentleman from the sablefish industry said, if your costs are lower because the services of the environment are being provided to you for free--oxygenated water and waste removal--why would you pay for them? There's no need to up your costs. However, that free operating environment comes, as we've heard extensively, at the expense of wild fish.

[Scott Andrews, Liberal, Avalon, NL]

But I still haven't got a grasp on how the economics of it works, because if it worked, why aren't people doing it?

[Dr. Andrew Wright]

Because it's cheaper, not economically impossible to do it in the ocean today, that doesn't mean to say that all costs are fairly articulated. In other words, you've got to pay for oxygenated water, and you've got to pay to deal with the waste that the farm would produce on land. So your operating costs would be higher than they would be in ocean. That doesn't mean to say that you're economically infeasible to do it.

We can get into the economics. Let me share some of them with you. To build a 1,000-tonne farm would cost you about $12 million, and it would take you about $6 million a year to run that farm. The revenue from it from fish alone would be about $11 million. If you utilize the waste stream--and this is incredibly important for everybody to understand--when you take fish from the open ocean, you're capturing nutrients from the open oceans, and you're exploiting them to build and grow fish. But a huge amount of that waste, the ammonia gets turned into nitrates, and the solid waste is actually feedstock. If you use that and capture that with associated aquaponics, you can put another $4 million on the bottom line of your numbers every year by growing lettuce, tomatoes, peppers. Two hundred kilograms of living fish will support 3,000 head of lettuce every six weeks. Today that economic benefit is being just dumped in the ocean.

So to net it out, you can be in the business, if you only do fish, of making $5 million a year profit on an investment of $12 million. If you do hydroponics and capture that waste, you can push that to $9 million. If you charge a premium for your chemical and therapeutant-free fish that you're capable of delivering now, you can get up to almost $19 million a year in revenue, which will leave you with $13 million a year after costs, pre-tax.

[Scott Andrews, Liberal, Avalon, NL]

I just find it strange that no company has found it economically viable for a private operation to do it.

[Dr. Andrew Wright]

Let me counter that. So you say, "Well, who is this chap out in nowhere who knows how to design silicon chips, coming in and telling us how to run a fish farm and build a fish farm?”

First of all, don't take my word for it. All my numbers are comparable and work within the mathematics that the U.S. department of aquaculture has worked on for 20 years.

Secondly, there are multiple companies globally, one called AKVA in Norway, one called AquaMaof in Israel, and our own consultant on our own coast, John Holder, who design and deliver turn-key closed containment farms for a living. All my numbers have been checked by those gentlemen of those companies, and they're comparable to those companies.

But if your bottom line is 10% cheaper by doing it in ocean, why would you be motivated to move on land? You wouldn't do it. If your only drivers and reward are profit and loss--and you don't have a need to increase your bottom-line cost because you're not forced to or required to--then you wouldn't do it, and that is the only reason.

We now have had our first example of successful closed containment salmon farming coming to the fore. Domsea aquafarms, run by Per Heggelund in Washington State, is now delivering 90 tonnes of artesian coho to Overwaitea, who are reimporting it into Canada.

To be fair, Rick Thompson has looked at this work too, and said, "Andy, you're right on the money," because we've looked at that farm in detail.

So please do not have any doubt that it's technically or economically feasible.

[Scott Andrews, Liberal, Avalon, NL]

Okay. Thank you.

I'm going to come back, but I want to get a question in to Mr. Orr regarding sea lice resistance. I know you touched on it near the end of your testimony, but I just have two questions for you on sea lice, one on sea lice resistance. That question is whether there is any scientific evidence to see it in Canada. We've heard about places like Norway, Chile, and that. They've seen sea lice resistance there. Is there any evidence that it's in Canada right now?

[Craig Orr]

We've been working with Dr. Crawford Revie, who's an expert on farm-salmon dynamics. He's been coordinating our monitoring programs for the coordinate area management that we've been doing in the Broughton, and they are starting to see some evidence in New Brunswick, where salmon has been farmed longer. We think that it's only a matter of time before it happens here.

In particular, we saw a huge problem in Norway in 2009. We just heard a talk where they had to resort to a slew of old chemicals, very dangerous chemicals, to control the situation this year. We've heard from lots of sea lice experts at this workshop too on how incredibly adaptable sea lice are to chemical therapeutants.

So it's only a matter of time before we see it definitively in B.C. What we need to do is run bioassays of the resistance of lice to these chemicals. That has not been done on this coast, but it is being done on the east coast.

[Scott Andrews, Liberal, Avalon, NL]

This committee has been given evidence that it's not likely to happen in our waters or in our operations because we don't use it as much as some other operations, where SLICE has been applied more frequently than in Canada.

[Craig Orr]

It's only a matter of rate until we catch up to the rest of the world. We are using it now. One of the things that is reducing infection pressures in the Broughton is the earlier application of SLICE, emamectin benzoate, which is a neuro-disruptor. There is absolutely no doubt that we'll catch up to the rest of the world. Unfortunately, it will probably be fairly soon.

[Scott Andrews, Liberal, Avalon, NL]

The second question is regarding juvenile fish leaving, and that it applies to the application of SLICE. Some of the companies have told us they apply SLICE to get the levels of sea lice down when juvenile salmon leave the river. You said you've experienced some of that in a one-week period when this was going on. Could you please elaborate on that a little further?

[Craig Orr]

Yes, as part of our agreement with Marine Harvest, the Coastal Alliance for Aquaculture Reform put some researchers on two of their farms in the Broughton Archipelago in the spring of 2006. We stood beside the louse counters and monitored their counts. We examined the efficacy of SLICE on the number of lice on the adult salmon in the farms. We found that it was very good and killed most of the lice. It kept them down for about eight weeks before the numbers started coming up again. It works quite well for a short period of time.

We were able to look at the dynamics of biocides on two of their farms--Sargeaunt Pass, and Humphrey Rock--during the spring of 2006. Those data are now being put together in a manuscript.

[Scott Andrews, Liberal, Avalon, NL]

I have a question for Mr. Hobson or Mr. Orr on the migratory paths of the Fraser sockeye. We've been told there are four migratory paths, two of which have no aquaculture farms on them. Is that correct?

[Craig Orr]

Again, we're just putting together a paper. We've been examining sockeye and sea lice on this coast, along with Mike Price and some other colleagues. We presented the preliminary results at Sea Lice 2010 here in Victoria just two days ago.

Sockeye come out of the Fraser. They go north through the Strait of Georgia and encounter the large concentration of salmon farms around the Campbell River, Discovery Islands areas. They make it up there relatively quickly. There's a small sub-population of Harrison Rapids sockeye that go out through the Strait of Juan de Fuca, and they don't go up the east coast of Vancouver Island. They do not encounter salmon farms. Curiously, their survival is quite good compared to the rest of the Fraser sockeye.

As you probably heard, the productivity of Fraser sockeye has gone down steadily since the mid-nineties in particular, to the point where they're barely able to replace themselves.

The other major populations of sockeye come out of the Skeena River. There are no salmon farms there. We have been working with Allen Gottesfeld at the Skeena Fisheries Commission. He's a biologist there for the first nations. We've compared the number of lice on sockeye coming out of the Skeena with those coming out of the Fraser. We have the DNA evidence, so we know those stocks. The numbers are a couple of orders of magnitude less of sea lice on the Skeena sockeye that do not migrate past salmon farms. But the ones from the Fraser that migrate past salmon farms have elevated levels of lice, in particular downstream of salmon farms. That means that before they get to the salmon farms we've been sampling them and they don't have a lot of lice, but once they get past the salmon farms the louse levels are elevated.

[The Chair, Conservative, Rodney Weston]

Thank you very much.

Monsieur Blais.