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.