Fisheries Committee on Oct. 28th, 2010

[Ruth Salmon]

Half of the seafood around the world is farmed. Half of the seafood that consumers are eating is farmed.

[Randy Kamp, Conservative, Pitt Meadows—Maple Ridge—Mission, BC]

The article goes on to quote Dr. Volpe, who says, referring primarily to your industry:

Because Atlantic salmon and other species are so efficient to produce, it actually drives incentive to adopt scales of production to heights that are ultimately, from an environmental point of view, very destructive.

I'm just wondering what comments you have about that.

[Clare Backman]

Well, I think to make a statement that the environmental effect is “destructive” is somewhat alarmist. I think every type of agriculture, whether it's done on land or in the water, makes some change to the environment in order to carry on. I think all forms of agriculture are committed to reducing and mitigating against the negative impacts of their operations, and I think that's true for the salmon farming industry worldwide. The pattern of change over the 25 years of commercial salmon farming around the world has been to monitor, identify, and mitigate against the environmental concerns.

[Randy Kamp, Conservative, Pitt Meadows—Maple Ridge—Mission, BC]

Okay.

I'm also wondering about what your role has been in terms of the regulations being produced in B.C. I know that there were public meetings and so on. Whether you were part of them, I don't know, or whether you were consulted in any way. Could you tell us about that?

As well, what in general do you think of the regulations, at least what you've seen of them so far? Of course you haven't seen the final version, but perhaps you could just comment on that, please.

[Clare Backman]

We're involved in the consultation for the development of the new federal regulations on the licensing of aquaculture. What we see at this point in time is simply that there is not going to be any relaxation with regard to our requirement to meet the public concern about reducing effects and mitigating effects in terms of environmental impacts. That is going to be greater, not less.

We see also, as I've mentioned in response to other questions, a greater need for transparency of the information that we collect. Whether it's to do with environment impact mitigation, to do with the health of our fish, or to do with the sea lice that we monitor, these are things that we see will become more transparent as we go forward.

[Randy Kamp, Conservative, Pitt Meadows—Maple Ridge—Mission, BC]

So at the end of the day, on December 18 we'll have a Fisheries Act that authorizes the creation of regulations. These regulations will be in place and will be enabling regulations that allow the imposition of licence conditions. That will be basically the legal regime under which you'll be operating.

I think you mentioned earlier, Ruth, that most jurisdictions, if not all, have some kind of aquaculture act, a stand-alone piece of legislation. How would the world be different in Canada if we had this aquaculture act as opposed to a regulation authorized by the Fisheries Act, and how would it be of benefit, I suppose, to Canada or at least to your industry?

[Ruth Salmon]

That's a good question.

Our sense is that the Department of Fisheries and Oceans actually has done an excellent job of developing regulations in a very short period of time. It was even evident when the court case came down that the ideal situation at that time would have been to go forward with legislation, but the time just wasn't there to allow that. So doing regulations under the Fisheries Act was the only option.

But it's not a good fit and it's been apparent. As Clare mentioned, we've been working closely with the department at various points and meetings along the way. And there are many things that the aquaculture industry does, as other farming industries do, normal farm practices, that really are not appropriate under the Fisheries Act because it's focused on wildlife management and it isn't talking about getting a product from egg to plate. From that perspective it's cumbersome and it doesn't work well for aquaculture.

But more than that, what would be really helpful is to have legislation that specifically addresses aquaculture and gives it the rights and legitimacy that it deserves. Not just that; it would also outline our responsibility. So it's not suggesting a free ticket, but a piece of legislation that outlines all of that and gives the legitimacy and the security to the industry.

We would have a much easier time--I'm sure Clare can support me on this one--getting and attracting investment into this country if we had clear legislation that outlined exactly the legitimacy of aquaculture, the roles and responsibilities. It would add to the common-sense regulations that we have already started with, but it would go further. That's really what we need to attract investment. Other countries have it and they can't believe we don't.

Clare.

[Clare Backman]

Ruth has covered the majority of it.

As Ruth mentioned earlier in her presentation, most other countries have an aquaculture act. Under an aquaculture act, our business would be compared, using similar metrics, to other forms of agriculture--growing of poultry and swine, and other kinds of agriculture products--as opposed to being compared to wild capture fishery, which is really quite a different undertaking.

[Randy Kamp, Conservative, Pitt Meadows—Maple Ridge—Mission, BC]

I see how that would work in a situation like British Columbia where now aquaculture is under federal jurisdiction, if we're talking about a piece of federal legislation. But how do you see that working across the country, where we have different models? P.E.I., for example, is mostly federally regulated. In New Brunswick it is largely under the jurisdiction of the province, and similarly in Newfoundland, and so on.

[Ruth Salmon]

My response is that we're less concerned with who is responsible and who gets delegated authority and how the management of that happens; what's important is to have that framework in national legislation. It could be that nothing really changes operationally but that the legislation is still there in place.

So I think it is possible.

[The Chair, Conservative, Rodney Weston]

Thank you very much.

On behalf of the committee, I'd like to say thank you for coming today and making your presentation and answering our questions. We really do appreciate your input here today and we certainly look forward to seeing you again.

Thank you.

[Ruth Salmon]

Great. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

[The Chair, Conservative, Rodney Weston]

We'll take a brief break, members, while we set up for our next witnesses.

[The Chair, Conservative, Rodney Weston]

I'd like to call this meeting back to order.

I'd like to welcome our guests. Here with us in the committee room we have Mr. Richard Harry, and joining us via video conference from Burnaby, British Columbia, is Mr. John Fraser and Mr. Jon O'Riordan.

Gentlemen, welcome, and thank you very much for taking the time today to meet with the committee to discuss your points of view and to answer some questions we might have. As I'm sure you're well aware, the committee has been studying western aquaculture and the impact on the wild Pacific salmon. We certainly do appreciate your taking the time today to meet with us.

Generally we allow about 10 minutes for presentations and then committee members will have an opportunity to ask some questions of you. They're constrained by some pretty tight timeframes. In the interest of trying to provide everybody with an opportunity to ask questions and for you to answer their questions, I'd ask that you try to adhere as closely to the timeframes as possible. Members are aware of what timeframes they're under and the time constraints they have to work under.

Mr. Harry, if you have some opening comments, we'll start with you.

[Richard Harry, President, Aboriginal Aquaculture Association]

Thank you, and thank you for the opportunity to make a presentation here.

My name is Richard Harry. I'm from Campbell River, B.C. I'm the chief of the Homalco First Nation. As well, I'm a commercial fisher involved in harvesting salmon and herring, and I have been involved with aquaculture for a number of years. Today I'm here as president of the Aboriginal Aquaculture Association.

We created the Aboriginal Aquaculture Association in 2003 to ensure that first nations were able to participate in the development of a sustainable aquaculture industry on the west coast of Canada. As you can appreciate, there are a lot of challenges mainly with finfish aquaculture. We have a number of first nations that have protocol agreements or joint venture agreements with industry, and I can share with you the information I get from those first nations.

A lot of the day-to-day assessments and evaluations are done on site. Klemtu is a good example. They do benthic sampling there, which involves looking at the ocean floor for impacts from feed, for instance. They do monitoring of sea lice within maybe a 50-mile radius. The comment from this first nation is that they have not seen any adverse effects over the 10 or 15 years they've been operating fish farm sites in their traditional territory. At some point it would be good to provide their findings to this committee. They have done thousands of dives on their sites for sampling, and there is no increase of sea lice within that radius of 50 miles that they use in their communities.

From a socio-economic point of view, it's the best thing that's happened to this community. It provides jobs and incomes as well as revenues for their community. This is a community that for many years depended on the wild fishery, and long before fish farms, 50 or 60 years ago, the salmon were on the decline. This community looked at aquaculture as a means of re-establishing itself, and it has done that for them. Their unemployment has dropped from 80% or 90% to probably 30% or 40%. The significance of aquaculture speaks for itself here. That's just a first nations community and a rural coastal community at that.

There are other first nations that have arrangements and agreements with industry and investors. The Ahousaht on the west coast of Vancouver Island out of Tofino, B.C., are another example. They have chosen to go with aquaculture to offset their high unemployment as well as to offset their social issues.

I can't say enough about what it's done for this community of 1,000 people. The biggest revenue source for that community is aquaculture. It has provided about 70 jobs on a full-time basis. You can't argue with that. They do all the monitoring with industry. Within their agreement they hold their industry partners to the highest standards of monitoring for sea lice or with regard to any of the accusations made about diseases or what not. They are partners to that. They are as well securing employment and revenues for their community.

The Aboriginal Aquaculture Association is certainly proactive in pursuing the development of an aquaculture industry on the west coast, be it finfish or be it shellfish. We only need to look at recent years, when there has been little or no salmon harvest, to understand that our coastal communities are looking for other ways and means to secure jobs and opportunities for their communities.

The forest industry has been declining for a number of years on the west coast. Then there's the wild fishery, which for most of our communities was always the biggest employer. This explains why we are looking to aquaculture.

You know, we want to do it in a way that minimizes the impacts on the environment. We are participating in the changeover of managing the industry--from the provincial to the federal--and we have made submissions to that. We're anxious to participate in the five-year aquaculture planning that DFO is heading up and to develop processes that would be inclusive of coastal communities.

What we've seen up to now is that they were almost a forgotten people on the coast when it comes to managing, whether it's the wild salmon or even aquaculture. First nations, then, need to have a larger role, a greater role of shared decision-making, and we're certainly pursuing that in the implementation of these regulations as well as the aquaculture planning.

We're certainly looking at not just aquaculture but also how first nations people can partake with government to enhance the wild fishery, be it sockeye, the chums, or pinks. And we'd like to find a way to develop a process to be able to develop ocean ranching, as an example. Ocean ranching is what takes place in Alaska, and Alaska has been able to support a commercial industry for many years.

If you look at the Pacific Rim countries--Russia and Japan and Alaska--those countries are heavily into huge hatcheries to support their industries. In B.C. we've gone the other way. We're minimizing or shutting down our salmon hatcheries to our detriment. We're left with a sunset industry in the wild fishery, which I've been a part of most of my life, and it's not a nice place to be.

Our American neighbours to the south do a better job than we do because they're stronger with hatcheries. If you look at Japan and Russia and Alaska, those countries have record harvest levels of salmon while we sit idle.

So we need to find some solutions for ourselves in the wild fishery. We need to take seriously that our coastal communities are there. First nations people are not going to leave; we're going to be there into the future. We're looking to find the ways and means to develop a process, to develop an aquaculture industry that is sustainable, both environmentally as well as culturally. We're looking to the federal government to find the ways and means to create investments and opportunities in salmon enhancement as well as ocean ranching.

We are partaking in the Cohen inquiry for the same reasons that I'm sharing with you now. This past year it's been a godsend to see more than 35 million sockeye show up on our shores. Don't tell me how that came to be. I have my own ideas on why it is, and why in recent years there's been little or no harvest opportunities for commercial fishers on the west coast. A lot of it has to do with how current policies have been implemented and managed in our resource. When you have 30% harvest rates, it almost eliminates any opportunities from past historical numbers, as high as 80%, of the Fraser sockeye.

So, you know, those things need to be reviewed, and some solutions found.

Maybe I'll leave my opening comments to that.

[The Chair, Conservative, Rodney Weston]

Thank you very much, Mr. Harry.

Dr. O'Riordan, did you want to make...?

Mr. Fraser wants to go first?

Please go ahead.

[John Fraser, Chair, former British Columbia Pacific Salmon Forum, As an Individual]

First of all, Dr. O'Riordan and I express our regards to Richard Harry.

I just want to point out to everybody that in the British Columbia Pacific Salmon Forum, two of our members, of course, were first nations members.

Now, I have not had a chance to sit down and look at the text of Mr. Harry's comments. If I had known what he was going to say, I might have been able to comment on them in a manner that would be helpful to the committee. While I agree with some of what he said, I think there are some very serious questions to be asked about some of the other things he said.

I don't know whether this is the time for me to start the presentation on behalf of Dr. O'Riordan and I....

Mr. Chairman, I didn't know we would be having a third person. As I say, we have very high respect for Mr. Richard Harry, but from a procedural point of view, we understood that we would be making a presentation of about ten minutes to start with, and then have an hour question period with respect to what this committee, that was established by the premier of the province, actually did, what it recommended, and what has happened to the recommendations.

We did four years, we spent $5 million, we established for the first time in the history of British Columbia an independent science advisory committee, and the sum total of our recommendations is that we had to have an ecosystem approach to all management on the west coast, it had to be monitored, and if fish farms managed their operations in such a way that they could keep the sea lice content on smolts going by to the same degree as places where there were no fish farms, then fish farms and wild salmon could coexist.

There are a lot of other things we said in this thing. We said that there must be adherence to the principle of monitoring; that fish farms have to send to the public the information of what is going on in their fish farms; and that from a subsistence point of view, the operations of fish farms have to be consistent with the continuation of wild salmon.

It's a big report. I don't know whether any of your members have had a chance to look at it, but we're certainly prepared to take questions on it.

Dr. O'Riordan has been for a number of years the coordinator, really, of all our science work. He is here, and without any question will be able to give a great deal of information to the members.

As I say, I'm taken by surprise, because while I have great respect for Richard Harry, and great respect for a number of other people in the first nations community, I don't agree with everything he said. I agree with much of what he said, but I would question some of it.

I didn't think we were here to question Richard Harry. And there are probably other members of the first nations who should comment.

[The Chair, Conservative, Rodney Weston]

Sir, you're not here to question Mr. Harry. That's what the committee members will do.

The members maybe would like to ask questions of you and Mr. Harry and Dr. O'Riordan at the same time. We are constrained in the amount of time we have to conduct these hearings. I apologize if you're taken by surprise with the appearance of Mr. Harry at the same time; however, that's the situation we find ourselves in here this morning. Mr. Harry is here, and he has made a presentation.

If you'd like committee members to proceed with questioning you and Dr. O'Riordan at the same time, or.... Certainly I know that committee members would like to do that, as well.

[John Fraser]

Look, if you think there's a bit of exasperation in my voice, well, there is. We spent $5 million on this report. We think it's an important report.

When Mr. Justice Hinkson came along and said that the 1987 agreement between the federal government and the province...transferring in effect constitutional authority over fisheries, I saw that agreement in 1987. I thought it exceeded the constitutional bounds. That agreement has changed everything. It has transferred most of the administration to the federal government, and some, I guess, in a way, with the provincial government.

Our recommendations were to the administration of aquaculture, but also the premier insisted that we give recommendations as to how to look after salmon and habitat on the west coast of Canada. Now that Hinkson has made his decision, this stuff has all sort of disappeared. We understand some work was going on with the federal government, but neither I nor any other member of this committee has been asked to meet with the federal government or anybody else as to how these recommendations should be implemented. All members of this committee ought to know this.

So if I'm a bit exasperated to find that the hour we thought we had may not work out, you can understand why.

The second thing I want to say is this. Dr. O'Riordan literally coordinated all of our scientific work, which is extraordinarily extensive. I just want everybody to understand this. We were the only place that ever established an independent science advisory committee on all these issues. It should have been done years and years and years ago. But we've done it, and yet this report seems to have just floated off into mid-air.

Now, as I say, what we did say is that if you do it right, you can have sustainable fish farms and wild fish, but there are a lot of steps you have to go through in order to do it right.

I watched for a few minutes Clare Backman and Ruth Salmon. Clare Backman has been one of the best people on the side of the industry that you could imagine, in terms of picking Marine Harvest, and finding ways to operate in such a way that your sea lice and other problems are minimized.

I'd better stop there. There are some other things you ought to also know, but you can ask us questions. I want Jon O'Riordan to say something about the science side of this thing.

[The Chair, Conservative, Rodney Weston]

Dr. O'Riordan and Mr. Fraser, your exasperation has been noted. I do appreciate you pointing that out. Certainly committee members will have an opportunity to ask questions.

Dr. O'Riordan, do you have a couple of comments you'd like to make?

[Jon O'Riordan, Science Research Coordinator, former British Columbia Pacific Salmon Forum, As an Individual]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

I believe there were two reasons for the genesis of the salmon forum. One was to bring independent science to try to resolve some of the conflicts between science that had affected the status of the industry in the years before the forum was set up. The second was to look at provincial legislation in watersheds to improve wild salmon.

As Mr. Fraser said, the forum set up an independent science advisory committee to provide a backbone to independent science. They decided that the key issue to be looked at by the forum was the issue of sea lice and salmon interaction in the Broughton. They felt that in the Broughton this issue was ground zero of the problems with the industry moving forward, and that if science could start to resolve the issues in the Broughton, it might help to open the door for ecosystem-based management along other parts of the coast. I think it's fair to say that the provincial government brought in a moratorium on salmon farming in the Skeena simply because of the concerns leading to wild salmon and farm salmon interaction in the Broughton.

The other point I'd like to make is that the science advisory committee acted as a peer review committee. The actual science was done by many of the scientists who, up until that time, had been competing with each other. So we actually brought all of the scientists working in this field under one tent. That's an important factor, because we were able to collaborate across the science spectrum and move to get more consensus than there had been prior to the advent of the forum.

The science advisory committee asked three questions. One, do fish farms increase sea lice in the Broughton? If they do, what's the threshold at which impacts start to occur in wild salmon as a result of sea lice infection? And third, what mitigation measures can the farms undertake to reduce that impact below effective levels?

In answer to these questions the forum found the following. Yes, it's very likely that fish farms in the Broughton have increased populations of sea lice in the Broughton. On the second question, the forum found there were two important ecological thresholds that needed to be met in terms of wild fish and farm fish interaction in the Broughton. The first was that in the spring, when the juvenile fish come out of the rivers, 97% of these fish should have no lice on them at all. Only 3% should have lice. Those are considered to be background levels. Second, those 3% of fish that do have lice on them should have less than one louse per fish when they're smaller than half a gram, which is generally in the March-April period.

So we set up a monitoring program to determine whether these two thresholds could be met. In 2008 both of these thresholds were met, and my understanding is that is also the case in 2009. Clare Backman has been involved with the industry and DFO to continue monitoring in 2010. As far as I know, these thresholds are being met in 2010.

This is a major reduction, because in 2004, some 70% of the fish had lice on them. In 2008, 3% of fish had lice on them. Why is that the case?

Well, over that period of time, the industry collaborated; that is, the two major companies in the Broughton did. They coordinated their harvesting so that at least half of the farms were harvested of fish by the time the small fish out-migrated, and the balance of the farms applied SLICE as a control mechanism to reduce lice on these fish. The monitoring that took place in 2008 and 2009 found zero lice on any fish in the Broughton in the period of April-May.

The forum then said these outcomes should be monitored. They recommended that the cap on production should be limited to about 18,500 fish to ensure that these thresholds weren't exceeded and that if these thresholds were still maintained, then that cap could be raised.

Finally, the forum did some research on SLICE to determine, for the first time, whether SLICE had an impact within the ambient environment on prawns, shellfish, and benthic fauna in and around fish farms. That work has just been completed, and it has been found that at this point in time SLICE has no lethal impacts on these marine organisms but does have a notable sublethal effect. So there are some concerns related to the prolonged use of SLICE on the marine environment.

I'd like to make two final comments. One is that although the forum did apply an ecosystem approach, in order to be effective an ecosystem approach needs to look at both the marine side of the environment and the watershed side of the environment. Salmon ecosystems are freshwater and marine, and so the forum had a number of recommendations to make sure that the freshwater component of the salmon was properly managed, as well as the marine side. The key recommendation was that the province should reorganize its agencies that issue licences and permits in watersheds so that they come under one authority rather than multiple authorities. On Monday the premier created such an authority, called the Ministry for Natural Resource Operations.

The final comment I'd like to make is that on the longer term, the forum recommended that the whole question of closed containment be reviewed by an independent committee of experts and that the issue be resolved one way or another over the next five years through a pilot closed containment project so that we will know the answer to the whole question of the viability of closed containment. For the long term, the industry is limiting its expansion until the question of closed containment can be resolved scientifically.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

[The Chair, Conservative, Rodney Weston]

Thank you very much, Dr. O'Riordan.

Ms. Murray.

[Joyce Murray, Liberal, Vancouver Quadra, BC]

Thank you.

Welcome to our committee. I'm very pleased to hear from both of the witnesses, Dr. O'Riordan and the Honourable John Fraser.

I do want to pass on a hello from my colleague Lawrence MacAulay. He has graciously given me his time, and I know he also wanted to express his appreciation.

I think the Pacific Salmon Forum report is a critical document for our committee, so I'll be asking the clerk to circulate it, but I would appreciate a bit more detail as to the recommendations that came out of the report.

Also, could you tell us a bit more about which ones were implemented? For example, have the production caps in the Broughton been respected? Has the density increased or the production increased there?

I asked earlier about the experiment in the Broughton, which was proposed in your report. Perhaps you could comment on the degree to which that's been implemented.

I'm interested in the Ministry of Natural Resource Operations. I haven't dug into that. I know the province changed the water governance a few years ago by bringing it back together, largely under the environment ministry, from a previous model in which it had been fragmented.

Finally, could you tell me, Dr. O'Riordan, whether the Ministry of Natural Resource Operations is explicitly tasked to implement the kind of integrated watershed regulatory model that your forum proposed?

Thanks.

[Jon O'Riordan]

It's nice to see you again.

The short answer is yes. The reorganization was announced only on Monday, so it's early days to know how effective it is.

The principal concern of the forum in terms of watersheds was that the province was issuing independently across a number of different agencies--forests, tourism, lands, environment, and mining--different permissions to access and do business with watersheds. And although none of these individual agencies was trying to do damage to the watersheds, no one was looking at the collective effects of all of these decisions on watersheds, which act as whole ecosystems.

The forum felt there had to be some oversight, some mechanism by which every decision on independent power projects, resource roads, mining projects, and forestry was looked at so that it didn't exceed the ecological limits of the watersheds and thereby affect the health of species such as salmon.

With the advent of this natural resource agency, every agency that issues permits, whether they're forest permits, water permits, land permits, or mining permits, is now under one agency. So there is the opportunity to keep score of the approvals being made on watersheds and hopefully make sure they don't exceed the ecological capacity of these watersheds.

[Joyce Murray, Liberal, Vancouver Quadra, BC]

Can you also address--in the couple of minutes we have left--the questions around production caps, the other conclusions that your report reached, the important ones that you felt were not implemented, and some that were implemented?